Yet another reason why weblogs are good....
With another example of how I can always benefit from a smart editor. Lilia Efimova captures my thought stream with a marvelously concise phrase, and asks good questions.

True... One more argument of using good practice instead of best practice.

With one more thought: what if those top-performers are early adopters of tomorrow's mainstream? What if they do innovative things that could bring real break-through?

This is yet another reason why weblogs can be so useful. Your ideas can be reflected, summarized, adapted, analogized, metaphorized, repeated, challenged, bent, twisted, or misinterpreted -- so you can choose to clarify, and think further about what you were trying to say, and rewrite, edit and repost. These are all good things.

Now to take a stab at answering your questions...

I agree some exemplars are ahead of what will eventually become mainstream -- and if they generate break-throughs that can be adapted to use by others, by all means use them. Adapt them. Strive to improve them. Remember, you and a few others reading this are using a personal publishing tool (Radio) that has emerged through such a process.

Such break-throughs will then become the new benchmark for good practice. One trend seen in today's economy is the ability of successful groups to adapt and evolve their practices as the environment shifts around them. Those that do not adapt well often try to stiffle the environment (Eldred lawsuit, RIAA copy-protection, Disney copyright extension, ...) to maintain their 'competitive' advantage. Some will live on for while doing this, others will eat away at their own goodwill, and eventually become business school teaching cases.

Good management should try to get as many employees as possiible to follow good practices, and weed out those who cannot perform them AND do not generate desired results. That said they should not try to force eveyone to be an exemplary performer, since failure is almost guaranteed -- you can't make a dog do everything a cat does, nor should you try (Don't try the reverse, either.). Exemplary performers often break rules, but often do so in a way that creates a desired outcome, so they are usually (or sometimes should be) left alone to continue performing well, as long as the outcomes are still desirable. Not everyone has the KSA to do things the way the exemplars do, which is precisely why those individuals who can are exemplary -- otherwise, it would be an extreme case of the Lake Wobegon Effect. :-)

7:43:41 AM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    [ blinked via Mathemagenic ]

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