Barry Horwitz provides a post that is designed to make you rethink best practices. I often hear about companies that want to use a process of “best practices” in their planning work. This may seem like a logical place to start, however, in my mind, the best practice — especially when it comes to developing strategy for an organization — is to not use “best practices” at all. Consider one now classic example, that of retailing genius Ron Johnson, creator…

  When building a bicycle for his daughter, Azim Nagree was reminded of the importance of two key components of best practices: process and documentation. Last week, my daughter turned 4 and I found myself, late at night, trying to build her new birthday bike. The task would have been made easier if the instructions were decent, but unfortunately, they were written poorly so I ended up just trying to figure it out myself. What should have been a one…

  Tobias Baer explains why the lack of randomized testing hampers businesses and raises the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The lack of randomized testing again and again hampers businesses because it means executives need to make decisions half blind – and Covid-19 is no different, only that in the case of Covid-19, the cost of not doing randomized testing literally might run into the trillions of dollars. Randomized testing is nothing new – and widely considered best practice in…