E LOVE OUR BEST PRACTICES, Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter write in their recent book, Hu-
manize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World: “We like our case studies and our white papers and our army of consultants who can go out there and figure out what the best practices are so we don’t have to.” There is one problem, the authors warn:
“Best practices are evil.” Come again? In an environment that is changing fast, “the harder we try to find answers to our problems by looking backwards, the farther we fall behind,” Grant and Notter write. But if best practices drag us down, they
say, innovation can lead us forward: “Innovation and best practices are different at their very core. Innovation’s logic understands that systems by their nature are constantly generating new problems (and new solutions) all the time.
TIPSTER
Vase to Vase
L
OOKING TO JAZZ UP THE TABLE SET- tings at your next fancy sit-down dinner? Watch a video showing how Middlesex, U.K.–based Alexander Interiors combined gerbera daisies, cel- lophane, water, and melted wax to cre- ate elegant, shimmering centerpieces for Britain’s 2010 Sports Industry Awards: http://bit.ly /gerbera-display. n
30 pcma convene February 2012 RESEARCH
Stormy Weather 580,000
$684 million $175 million
in lost spending on business travel
‘INNOVATION’S LOGIC’: “Innovation and best practices are different at their core,” Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter write in Humanize. “Innovation’s logic understands that systems by their nature are constantly generating new problems (and new solutions) all the time.”
In fact, as soon as you solve a particular problem, the solution then becomes a part of the status quo, which is part of a dynamic, evolving system, thus the solution starts to generate new problems of its own. That is why best practices are killing us. By the time you adopt a solution that was generated in the past, it is less likely to be applicable in
your current situation.” Innovation, on the other hand, “values a future focus,
creativity, and the discipline of experimentation, where an- swers come from learning, rather than pure imitation.” n
A Category 3 hurricane “with peak duration of 1–2 days and a path that skirts the Eastern seaboard of the United States” would result in:
interrupted or canceled business trips Q
SOURCE: “U.S. Business Travel Outlook: Disaster Scenario,” GBTA Foundation (www.gbta.org)
in lost federal, state, and local tax revenues www.pcma.org