Getting It Right the Second Time

Getting It Right the Second Time

How can you replicate successful initiatives without falling in usual traps?

Author(s): Gabriel Szulanski, Sidney Winter

Publisher: Harvard Business Review

Date of publication: 2002

Read this article on the publisher's website [Harvard Business Review]

Summary

A large number of studies and feedback on experience show that attempts to institutionalize benchmark practices often meet with disappointing results. Why is it so difficult to replicate successful initiatives from one time to the next or from one site to another? This article presents an inventory of the most frequent errors committed in managing such projects. The authors underline in particular the biases which can rapidly blind leaders and cause them to overestimate the infallibility of their model. They then draw some broad outlines for companies to follow to improve the reliability of their best practice dissemination approaches.