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Abstract

This is an enhanced edition of the HBR reprint R0201E, originally published in January 2002. HBR OnPoint articles save you time by enhancing an original Harvard Business Review article with an overview that draws out the main points and an annotated bibliography that points you to related resources. This enables you to scan, absorb, and share the management insights with others. Once a business performs a complex activity well, the parent organization often wants to replicate that success. But doing that is surprisingly difficult, and businesses nearly always fail when they try to reproduce a best practice. The reason? People approaching best-practice replication are overly optimistic and overconfident. Getting it right the second time (and all the times after that) involves adjusting for overconfidence in your own abilities and imposing strict discipline on the process and the organization. The authors studied numerous business settings to find out how organizational routines were successfully reproduced, and they identified five steps for successful replication. First, make sure you''ve got something that can be copied and that''s worth copying. Second, work from a single template. Third, copy the example exactly, and fourth, make changes only after you achieve acceptable results. Fifth, don''t throw away the template. If your copy doesn''t work, you can use the template to identify and solve problems.

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Abstract

This is an enhanced edition of the HBR reprint R0201E, originally published in January 2002. HBR OnPoint articles save you time by enhancing an original Harvard Business Review article with an overview that draws out the main points and an annotated bibliography that points you to related resources. This enables you to scan, absorb, and share the management insights with others. Once a business performs a complex activity well, the parent organization often wants to replicate that success. But doing that is surprisingly difficult, and businesses nearly always fail when they try to reproduce a best practice. The reason? People approaching best-practice replication are overly optimistic and overconfident. Getting it right the second time (and all the times after that) involves adjusting for overconfidence in your own abilities and imposing strict discipline on the process and the organization. The authors studied numerous business settings to find out how organizational routines were successfully reproduced, and they identified five steps for successful replication. First, make sure you''ve got something that can be copied and that''s worth copying. Second, work from a single template. Third, copy the example exactly, and fourth, make changes only after you achieve acceptable results. Fifth, don''t throw away the template. If your copy doesn''t work, you can use the template to identify and solve problems.

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