Best Practices Are a Strategy for Being Average

A company wants to close the gap with the market leader, so it does the sensible thing. It studies what the leader does. It benchmarks its operations against the best in the industry, brings in advisors who have seen how the top performers run, and adopts their best practices one at a time. A year later the operation is cleaner, the processes are tighter, but the company is still behind. It did everything right and gained no ground.

This happens constantly, and it is not bad luck. It is the predictable result of a strategy built on imitation. Copying what the best companies do feels like the responsible path to becoming one of them, but it sometimes guarantees the opposite. The things you can observe and adopt from a competitor are, by definition, the things available to everyone. Build your plan on them and you are not catching up but rather converging on the middle alongside every other company that read the same case study.

A Practice You Can Copy Can't Set You Apart

The entire logic of competitive advantage rests on doing something your rivals do not because an advantage that everyone shares is not an advantage, it is table stakes. And best practices are, by their nature, the most widely shared things in any industry. The moment a method is documented, benchmarked, written up, and taught by the same consultants who visit your competitors, it is accessible to all of them too. It becomes established, proven, and available to anyone willing to copy it.

So, when you adopt one, you are not pulling ahead. At most you are catching up to a standard the leaders set years ago and have already moved past. The practices you can see and import are the ones that have stopped being sources of advantage for the people you copied them from, which is precisely why they are comfortable letting you see them. The real edge sits in the things that do not travel, the judgment, the relationships, the hard trade-offs that never make it into a benchmark report.

Imitation Means Fighting on Your Competitor's Terms

There is a deeper cost to imitation than slow progress. When you adopt the leader's playbook, you agree to compete on the dimensions the leader already wins on. You accept their definition of what matters in the market, and then you try to beat them at it with fewer years of practice and a weaker position. You have chosen to be strongest exactly where your competitor is strongest, which is the one place a smaller player should never choose to fight.

A company that competes on its rival's terms is fighting uphill by design. Every improvement it makes validates the leader's model and moves the whole industry toward a single way of operating, one the leader defined and is best at. The imitator works hard, closes some of the gap, and still loses, because it entered a contest its competitor had already won. Looking like a smaller version of the market leader is not a path to overtaking it. It is a decision to trail it indefinitely.

Find What You Would Do That They Wouldn't

The more useful question is not what are the best companies doing. It is what could we do that our competitors would not, or could not, follow. Where would we make a trade-off they are unwilling to make. What do we understand about this market, or these customers, that their model ignores. Those questions point toward difference, which is where advantage lives, rather than toward the sameness that benchmarking produces.

This is harder than adopting a best practice, because there is no case study to copy and no external validation that it will work. A genuine strategic choice always looks a little exposed at the start, precisely because no one else is making it. But that exposure is the point. If the move were obvious and proven, your competitors would already be making it, and it would confer no advantage. The uncomfortable, unbenchmarkable choices are the only ones that can separate you from the field.

Strategy is the search for a defensible difference, not the pursuit of a common standard. Best practices will make you competent, and competence is worth having. It will not make you distinct, and only distinctness wins. The company that studies the leader until it becomes a tidier, smaller version of the leader has made a choice without noticing it made one. It has chosen to finish second.