Beyond the Endpoint

For decades, executives have been told and have themselves pushed for the adoption of “best practices”; those sacred, supposedly universal methods that guarantee success and build exceptional organizations. They are codified, taught, celebrated, and, for many leaders, treated as a finish line: implement them, check the box, and move on. Rather uncomfortably, the term itself is misleading, and the results are only best in appearance alone. Fundamentally, best practices are not truly the best at anything. They are yesterday’s averages; tools that are essential for compliance but fatal for innovation. The future belongs to leaders who move beyond them, cultivating cultures where ‘next practices’ can emerge and define tomorrow’s industries.

The problem begins with language. “Best” implies finality and suggests a single, universally optimal way of doing something. A method that exists above all others and will remain relevant indefinitely. Historically, the belief that standards could produce exceptional results was common, and the adoption of the terminology makes sense in this framing. The concept traces back to Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management principles, where the goal was efficiency through standardization. The “best way” to perform a task was identified, measured, and codified. For the factories and offices of the early 20th century, this was revolutionary, but very few modern-day enterprise systems are remotely as static as these factories. Markets change, technologies evolve, and human behavior adapts increasingly quickly. The term “best practice” remains, carrying the weight of authority while anchoring leaders to the past. Leaders must appreciate the distinction of the era best practices evolved in: an era where the primary challenge confronting leaders was scalability and mechanization. This has not been true for more than a century now, but the idea of standardization as the core solution to almost all business challenges remains.

The psychological danger is nuanced. By adopting a “best practice,” leaders and their teams are cognitively nudged toward believing they have achieved an ideal position. The label creates an illusion of control, a sense of having reached the summit. Once leaders and their teams feel they have peaked, the natural impulse is to stop climbing. They may invest in incremental tweaks, but they rarely challenge the underlying assumptions that made the practice “best” in the first place. As a result, organizations that follow best practices rigidly often fall prey to disruption, not because their strategies were incompetent, but because they were finalized too soon and too rigidly, ignoring or forgetting how the idea of what was ‘best’ came to exist in the first place.

Consider Kodak. In 1975, the company invented the first digital camera and revolutionized the photography industry. Despite this innovation, leadership clung to the profitable film-based business that had defined its dominance for decades. Their “best practice” was protecting the core business, and the idea of embracing digital photography was treated as a threat. Resultingly, Kodak invented the future only to watch it pass by, eventually filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September of 2012. Similarly, Nokia’s focus on hardware over software blinded it to the smartphone revolution, and Blockbuster’s faith in physical rentals left it vulnerable to Netflix’s agile, customer-centric approach. In all three cases, best practices became finish lines, not foundations. The very methods that had created success now ensured the company would stagnate and fail.

The story of complacency does not need to be fatalistic. Netflix’s evolution, Microsoft under Satya Nadella, and GE Healthcare all show that the difference lies in how leaders treat standard methods. Netflix didn’t stop at the DVD-by-mail service; it used it as a stepping stone toward licensing catalogs of existing content for on-demand streaming, before finally moving to creating original content. Nadella didn’t focus on product innovation first; he transformed Microsoft’s culture, replacing a competitive “know-it-all” mindset with a collaborative “learn-it-all” philosophy, enabling risk-taking and bold pivots. GE Healthcare reimagined MRI machines for pediatric patients, turning a standard clinical tool into an experience that improved both satisfaction and outcomes. In these examples, standard practices were not endpoints, nor did they act as a defence of existing systems; they became new starting points for exploration and continued innovation.

Leaders who achieve transformative results are not determined solely by audacity but by a mindset of embracing uncertainty and a capability to leverage discomfort as a tool for growth. They are comfortable with ambiguity, proactive rather than reactive, and willing to iterate and experiment. They foster psychological safety, empowering teams to speak up, challenge assumptions, and test unconventional ideas without fear of blame. In other words, they cultivate the environments where those pioneering methods that redefine industries—or “next practices”—can emerge.

The Path from Standardization to Transformation

The path from standardization to transformation can be visualized as a continuum:

• Standard Practices (Renamed from Best Practices) provide safety, efficiency, and compliance. They are predictable, repeatable, and essential, particularly in regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and cybersecurity. They do not, however, offer any form of strategic differentiation or ensure industry leadership.
• Emerging Practices are iterative, adaptive methods that improve on standards. They offer incremental advantage and hint at new possibilities.
• Next Practices are untested, disruptive, and potentially game-changing. They challenge assumptions, create new markets, and distinguish leaders from followers.

Executives must see best practices as floors to build on rather than ceilings to meet. Regulatory compliance, operational standards, and documented methods are critical starting points, with excellence requiring pushing beyond, exploring emerging methods, and daring to invent next practices that will define the future. Cross-industry innovation (such as the type of innovation produced using innovations, including the Sector Convergence Model) often accelerates this process: BMW borrowing joystick controls from gaming for its iDrive system, or Coca-Cola adapting medical dosing technology for its Freestyle dispenser, are excellent examples of thinking outside rigid industry confines.

Of course, innovation is not risk-free. Projects like Google Glass or large-scale government initiatives demonstrate that even next practices can fail if executed without alignment, research, or cultural support. The lesson is not to avoid innovation but to pair it with thoughtful leadership, creating and aligning culture with innovation, learning from failures, and maintaining disciplined experimentation.

The first shift to make begins with language. Leaders should wholly deprecate the term “best practice” with terms that reflect the evolutionary nature of business: “standard,” “preferred,” or “evolving practice,” for example. They should frame problems as challenges, opportunities, or experiments rather than crises, institutionalize learning sessions rather than post-mortems, and encourage curiosity over blame. By consciously shaping language and working to remove finality from processes, leaders subtly direct their organizations toward continuous improvement and perpetual readiness.

Ultimately, executive leadership is about creating conditions where the next path can emerge and knowing how to rapidly eliminate possible solutions, not about immediately having the answer. Best practices can ensure stability, but they cannot produce transformation. The real task of the executive is to move beyond mediocrity, to challenge assumptions, allow for experimentation, and to pursue innovations that define the ‘tomorrow’ for their team.

“The higher up you go in a company, the more the role changes from ‘this is what we do today’ to ‘this is what we need to be doing in the future.’ Quality executive-level leadership is about finding a way to go from the present to the future.”— Bryce Porter, CEO, PMG