Leadership

Best Practices? Why Not Share Your Worst Practices?

By Jessica Stillman

Updated on: May 12, 2009 / 9:17 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

The Find: A prominent academic asks a thought-provoking question: why don't we share our worst practices?
The Source: The blog of Chris Blattman, professor of political science and economics at Yale.

The Takeaway: On BNET, as elsewhere in the world of management, business leaders are encouraged to share best practices. This makes sense, of course, allowing colleagues to emulate others' successes. But on his blog today, Blattman, who often works in the developing world, shares a startlingly simple but very powerful insight:

We talk endlessly of best practices in development, peacebuilding, business. You name it. I heard an excellent idea at a conference last week: why don't we write more about worst practices?

Most likely, the answer is embarrassment and institutional structures that reward those who trumpet their successes and brush their failures under the rug, but are our failures not actually more instructive â€" and more worth sharing â€" than our successes? After all, if someone has tried an idea and failed miserably, I'd rather they told me before I gave it a go. Blattman concludes, "we need volumes and volumes on worst practices," and offers some much needed worst practices in his own field, including "how to royally screw up election monitoring" and "101 ways not to reform your schools."

The Question: For the enlightenment of your peers, would anyone be bold enough to share their own worst practices from management?

(Stop bad ideas image from Yogi, CC 2.0)