Best Practices: Akbar & Birbal

Best practices cannot be replicated by imitating underlying routines. Tacit nature of many routines makes it difficult to identify and understand how they support a particular competence. Organizational routines can be visualized as tacit activities. Organisational learning and knowledge management processes aim to capture these activities and codify them as standard operating practices.

From out of these best practices; activities and tasks are to be derived, for implementing. Identifying activities and tasks from best practices is not easy as there is a large gap between what a task looks like in a process manual and what it exactly is in reality. Actual work practices are full of tacit improvisations that the employees who carry them out would have trouble articulating.

For successful adoption of best practices and to get high returns from investments in expensive IT tools like ERP, the organisations need to focus first on transformation of attitude and mind sets of users and only thereafter codification of the knowledge or best practices using Information Technology be targeted.

The challenges in adopting best practices are that these are not static but represent a moving target and objectives and firms need to continually strive towards deeper levels of adoption and integration. Also, there is synergic and systemic links between several of these best practices and they are effective when implemented together. Many believe that best practices aren't suitable competitive advantage because they are so easy to copy. It is true that, once best practice is out there, every body can imitate it, but companies that win do two things i.e. they imitate and improve.

Indian culture is full of such best practices. These cannot be fully understood without knowledge of the folk idiom. Every Indian practice is indebted to oral traditions and folk stories. The aesthetics, ethos, and worldview of a person are shaped in childhood and throughout early life, and reinforced later, by these verbal and non-verbal environments. In largely everyone whether poor or rich, high caste or low, professor, pundit, or ignoramus, engineer or street hawker everyone has inside him a large well of best practices.

This large well of knowledge is found in everyday practices and practical coping. Folk tales, local narratives, and idioms serve as the building block of Indian business culture. For example, stories of Akbar and Birbal, Tenali Rama, and Mulla Nasseruddin all point to a contextual understanding. They indicate a notion of corporate governance as common mores, and entrepreneurship as opportunistic 'making do'.

Best Practices from Akbar & Birbal:

Once King Akbar had some quarrel with Birbal so he went on an exile to stay in a nearby village hiding his identity.

Akbar later realized his mistake so he found out a way to search Birbal. He announced that all land owners of nearby villages should come to him with their wells so that the best practices in maintaining a well can be identified and imbibed for maintaining the government wells. Anybody failing to do so will have to pay a fine of Rs.10000/-.

This order was also heard in the village where Birbal lived. The land owners of that village thinking that it is impossible to move a water well physically to any other place, started abusing the king for levying such a huge inescapable penalty in name of sharing best practices.

When Birbal heard of this, he knew it was Akbar's trick to find Birbal and Akbar actually meant knowledge well of best practices i.e land owners' own mind so that goverment well i.e government officials' mind can imbibe best practices from them.

So Birbal explained something to the land owners and next day the land owners along with Birbal arrived in Delhi. They did not enter the city and stayed outside the city. One of the land owners came to king and said that according to king's orders they have come with their wells, now King needs to send his wells to welcome them.

When Akbar heard this, he understood that it was Birbal's trick. He asked the land owner, who told him to tell this way? The land owner replied, a stranger who came to stay in our village some time ago asked him to tell this to you. When asked about his physical appearance, it matched that of Birbal's. Then Akbar sent his people to welcome Birbal to be brought into the city with a great pomp and show.

There are more stories like this how Akbar found Birbal back. Some people are so passionate about their work and they reveal their talent so often. So please go ahead and try out Akbar's best practices for searching, attracting and retaining the right talent.