What if I told you that I’ve figured out the exact process that will not only keep your business intact, but get your customers excited again and willing to pull the trigger on your most profitable offers? It’s deceptively simple and something nobody else has thought of before. The secret comes from traditional Asian farming methods that were almost lost to history until they were recently discovered by a team of business executives scouting new locations for a fabrication plant. And it all starts with you learning that I am full of crap.

In my job, I meet a lot of experts: celebrity consultants, entrepreneurs, book authors, university professors, top-notch managers, inventors, engineers, scientists, and many others. If the “Product Development Genius” category exists, I have likely met its members, likely read their articles or books, listened to their anecdotes, sat through their keynotes, and bought their t-shirts. Over the years I’ve been fortunate to be exposed to great wisdom, glimpsed much genius, and collected billion-dollar advice. And then I promptly forget the details. It’s not that things don’t stick, there’s just not a whole lot of capacity for stuff in there anymore. There is just too much genius out there.

This sheer quantity of knowledge is a problem for us mere mortals seeking help. I deal in markets that seek this knowledge; my job is to act as a “broker” of information. And there are many commonalities that one starts to notice in this environment. A majority of people are seeking ‘best practices,’ which actually means they are looking for a “shortcut” to solve a problem. However, most potential solutions will appear as a garden of forking paths, whereas the expectation was for a highlighted route like you see on a GPS. This is why the vast majority of best practices are disappointing. They don’t come with turn-by-turn directions.

Another commonality is people believe that for every problem there is a person with the secret magic answer. I’ve seen infomercials that play on this: They hawk books or videos that promise to reveal the secret to weight loss, the method for photographic memory, or even how to live forever. Smart people know that they don’t give you the answer in the commercial, because it’s likely the weight loss requires a diet of inedible food, total recall requires an unsustainable talent for mnemonic devices, and immortality requires an unaffordable intake of over a dozen daily supplements (and then you die, anyway). But people love “secrets” and get giddy over the prospect of being in on one. Think about this the next time someone offers you the secret to slashing cycle time, catalyzing productivity, or boosting innovation.

One of my favorite experts was a consultant named Thornton May. At a conference on Product Data Management software, he put up two slides for the audience, each had just a few words in big, bold letters, the first one said “The Experts Aren’t” and the second one said “Vendors Suck and Lie.” Not much explanation was needed as most in the audience held those words to be self-evident.

Since I am in the business of putting on educational events that promise best-practice type stuff, you might think it foolish of me to seemingly pooh-pooh their value. But my customers are bright people; they mostly understand that a “best practice” is actually more like a list of ingredients than a recipe. You don’t watch Emeril on TV and think your guacamole will taste as good. And you don’t listen to a keynote by Bill Gates and think as a result you’ll create personal wealth that can eclipse the GDP of many small countries. You go to collect ideas and knowledge that you can build on yourself.

In the 1990s, I attended a keynote presentation by Art Byrne, then the CEO of Wiremold, a company featured in the book Lean Thinking. He outlined in great detail the steps they took to achieve a lean shop floor whose results were the envy of his industry. When asked if he was concerned about revealing such specific methods to his competitors in such an open forum, his reply was that he didn’t care. His success was the result of painful, tireless labor, and if any of his rivals dared to go through the same thing he did, he felt they deserved it. So he openly shared his strategy.

Like hospital staph infections, often the “disease”’ of product development are caused by the person working to effect the cure. The Latin word for this is iatrogenic, meaning a condition is “inadvertently induced by treatment or medication.” We are, in truth, our own worst enemy. The only thing you can really do is be more of a systems thinker. I know that sounds “so ‘90s,” but only through awareness of interdependencies and understanding each piece of your process, not just your own part of it, can you avoid unwanted side effects in product development. Whether you’re implementing six sigma, lean, phase-gates, or any other best practice, you simply can not follow prescription, you must write your own.