The One Best Way to failure
Is your organisation standardising its way into oblivion?
“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” — Martin Luther King Jr 1
I’ve written previously about how the operating model of mainstream management consulting firms makes it impossible for them not to stifle, smother, and strangle the emergence of future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness in the organisations that hire them.2
“One Best Way Thinking” is one of Five Fatal Habits mainstream consulting firms introduce, implement, and instil into client organisations, undermining their ability to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable future. 3
The problem of “One Best Way Thinking” was well illustrated in a client organisation I worked with in the early 2000’s.
The organisation was a global leader in speciality chemicals, headquartered in the US, with operations around the world.
They had recently hired a new Global Head of Production who, wanting to make his mark, announced his intention to implement One Best Way of manufacturing across the whole business.
On the surface, this may seem a self-evidently sensible thing to do.
Why have multiple ways of working in what is largely seen as a commodity business in which profitability depends on efficiencies and economies of scale?
Added to that, the “One Company Worldwide” mantra has obvious attractions in making life simple for those whose job titles are “Global Head of…”
The CEO however, was mindful of something said to him by the CEO of the European regional operation — their most profitable business unit by far:
“How we do things over here does not seem to be understood or appreciated by US senior leadership. They call us the benchmark for profitability, but never show any interest in finding out how we actually work.”
This comment caught the CEO’s attention, so he asked me to take a closer look at “how they actually work”.
Headquartered in Germany, the European business had grown steadily over recent decades, headed up by a charismatic, some would say maverick, CEO.
He had hand picked the sales team, often headhunting people from their customers’ organisations, and instilled across the business an unusual definition of Quality: “Make your customer successful”.
By contrast, the prevailing perspective in the US operation was more aligned with the traditional interpretation of Quality meaning “Conformance to specification”.
Actually, if you go back to International Standard ISO 8402 — which was instrumental in promoting the shift from quality control — i.e. using small armies of inspectors to weed out failures — to quality assurance i.e. designing quality in from the start — you’ll see ISO 8402 defined Quality as “The totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.” 4
“Make your customer successful” clearly qualifies at least as an implied need — because if you don’t help your customers succeed, they’re unlikely to remain your customers for very long... 5
But few organisations were thinking of Quality in that broader sense, and both the US operation and the incoming Head of Production were fully focused on the narrower more constraining interpretation — “Conformance to specification”.
Once I’d seen how the European operation operationalised the focus on “making your customer successful”, it was hardly surprising that they were so profitable.
To make a customer successful you have to understand what “success” looks like to the customer, personally, as a unique individual, in their unique organisational context.
You cannot do this if you focus instead on what you think success should look like to an undifferentiated, generic buyer of speciality chemicals — i.e. conformance to specification.
That’s why the European CEO populated the sales team with people who cultivated strong personal relationships with customers, gaining deep insights into their unique situation, challenges, and aspirations.
The European CEO himself focused a lot of attention on ensuring everyone working in their formulation and production operations were similarly focused on what made their sales colleagues successful.
This meant dynamically adapting to customer demand, being highly flexible in producing small batches at short notice, sacrificing apparent efficiencies and economies of scale for the much greater prize of loyal long-term customers.
The European operation had, in effect, ensured that sense making, decision making, and action taking were tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded, and widely distributed throughout the organisation.
As a result, customers were more than happy to pay a premium for chemicals that they could have sourced elsewhere at 30% to 50% lower “conforms to specification” prices.
Ultimately it was the US operation’s focus on efficiency through One Best Way Thinking that prevented it from achieving the effectiveness demonstrated by the European operation…
Unfortunately, the tale has a sad ending.
The new Global Head of Production was so locked into the One Best Way Thinking mindset that he pressed on regardless, ignoring how the European business achieved its “benchmark profitability”, and imposing a standardised one-size-fits-all “best practice” philosophy to the global operations.
As a result, the European CEO and several senior colleagues left the business, which rapidly lost its reputation for being worth its 30%—50% price premium, becoming just another commodity supplier focused on cost cutting.
Over the next few years, the financial performance of the whole business declined and it was ultimately acquired by a competitor at a bargain basement price.
The organisation had discovered the One Best Way to failure.
Questions for reflection
How prevalent is One Best Way Thinking in your organisation..?
Do people have the freedom to “make their customers successful”, or are they constrained to comply with overly prescriptive processes and/or procedures..?
How prevalent are the other Fatal Habits — #2: All or Nothing Thinking; #3: Leadership that Creates Followers; #4: Wasting People’s Strengths; #5: Hired Help that Hinders..? 6
Strength to Love (1963) Chapter 2 Transformed nonconformist.
For more on why mainstream management consulting firms cost their clients much more than just their fat fees, see the previous article Veni, Vidi, Invoici.
Find out more about One Best Way Thinking, and how it — along with four other fatal habits — impairs organisational future-fitness, download your FREE copy of the 22-page guide to the Five Fatal Habits here.
ISO 8402:1986 was revised as ISO8402:1994 and eventually withdrawn as its essential content was incorporated into ISO9000:2000.
This sense of understanding more deeply what customers want has resurfaced in the Jobs to be Done philosophy of people like Bob Moesta.
For more on these habits, download your FREE copy of the 22-page guide to the Five Fatal Habits here.