Forget Best Practices

As CEO of his own firm, Ken Fisher has a longstanding policy of banning the phrase “best practices,” because, he says, “best practices is a good way to get a lousy firm up to being a little bit better than average. What you really want is ‘not-yet-done practices.’ All best practices gets you to is where you’re operating the way all the other fellows are. It doesn’t give you any proprietary edge. Best practices don’t create exceptional; best practices would be very good for something like accounting, because you don’t want your accountant to do some ‘never-yet-done’ practice.”