These Are The Top Three Reasons Benchmarking Is Not Good For You And Your Company

Benchmarking has been a buzzword for four to five decades now. It got here into its very own inside the years when TQM (Total Quality Management) became the handiest gospel fact on the way to turn out to be the first-class. The Japanese had taken over the arena and for America and Western Europe to trap up; they had to benchmark the first-class of what the Japanese had been doing. And who propounded and preserve to propound these ideas? You bet right, the massive boys: BCG, Bain, Accenture, PWC, McKinsey, KPMG, Deloitte, Gemini and the relaxation of them.

Benchmarking one zero one honestly says get all of the metrics how your first-rate competitor is doing and evaluate to your performance. Wherever you perform worse, it truly is the space. Pronto you have cracked the code. Take instantaneous movement to shut the distance and you can be as excellent as them (your competitor) or maybe jump frog them. They sponsored up their shows with fashionable  via  graphs (system visuals as Alan Weiss calls them) and CEOs looking for ever extra highly-priced short fixes might bounce on the hints and their treasuries would be the poorer for it.

Tell me, if benchmarking is surely this treatment-it-all antidote to lackluster overall performance (the huge boys could deny they said it became a cure-it-all), how come Kodak did no longer benchmark its manner to survival? How come Nokia could not benchmark its way to success and push back Apple and Samsung? What of Motorola that invented the cellular cellphone era and Xerox that taught the arena the way to copy? Why couldn't the bluest of the blue, with all its technological wizardry do it, and had to send John Akers to the labour market? Beware, the elephant can't dance until and till it comes to a decision to dance by changing its genetic code.

So right here are the top 3 reasons why you must by no means contact benchmarking with a ten-foot pole in case you really need to be amazing, wreck new mildew and render the opposition beside the point.

1. Benchmarking ignores the tradition of the higher acting business enterprise 

This is the mom of all motives why benchmarking is a fatal flaw. Assuming you are Intel and the Japanese are consuming your lunch, what do you do? Do you pass on a retreat and benchmark the Japanese to blow them out of the water? Do you call a metropolis-corridor meeting to sensitize everyone approximately the Japanese's danger and fast form brief action groups (QATs) to benchmark the Japanese to prepare the way on your glorious comeback? Do you send your pinnacle executives to Harvard to analyze benchmarking at its fine which will shape a groundswell movement that might make you invincible overnight? No! No!! No!!! You do what Andy Grove, Robert Noyce (and Gordon Moore) did. You hearth yourselves and start all once more. Remember, best the paranoid live on. You can not beat the Japanese in head-to-head fight because the cultures are distinctive. Period! Have you now not heard that lifestyle will devour strategy for breakfast?

2. Benchmarking looks at the future with the rear-view replicate 

Assuming you're IBM and you're the world's maximum well-liked company and teased as the Big Blue, and you listen two small boys are fiddling in their mother's storage and they say they want to topple IBM. Do you postpone your board assembly and send spies to see what the lads are as much as or do you benchmark? Benchmark what? Benchmark Apple I or Apple II or iMac that don't but exist? The Big Boys would deny they ever said which you have to benchmark under such instances. But failed to they are saying benchmarking turned into the alpha and omega of the competitive gear? You will in no way see the destiny together with your rear-view replicate even if you're a magician. The reality is, when there's disruption (air tour disrupted sea journey, laptop disrupted typewriter, gun disrupted bow and arrow, and so forth.), the entirety is reset to zero so no quantity of benchmarking can save you. We live in an age of discontinuity, thanks to Peter Drucker, and whilst discontinuity catches up with you and your industry, benchmarking is foolhardiness of the highest order.

Three. Benchmarking ignores essential thinking and can't assist you invent the future 

The fine way to personal the next day is to invent it. Benchmarking can not assist you do that. Benchmarking is definitely antithetical to reinvention. The maximum modern inventions of our time have been or are by no means the products of benchmarking however essential questioning. Think of products as mundane (now) as paper, submit-it-notice and mild bulb, to mention three. These matters in no way existed before till human beings's creativeness added them to be. To invent the destiny, you begin with a clean slate. You ask simple questions like, "why does this paintings depend?", "what motive does it serve?", "why this (and now not that?" These kind of questions allow you suspect critically, cross deep and invent day after today while others are busy benchmarking and gambling seize-up with the supposedly quality organizations.

There you have them, the three motives why benchmarking need to be prevented because the plaque: benchmarking ignores the way of life of the better acting employer, benchmarking seems on the future with the rear-view reflect, and benchmarking ignores crucial questioning and can't help you invent and reinvent the future.

If you appearance intently, benchmarking is on the coronary heart of the so-known as, worldwide best exercise(s) in industries throughout the globe and who are the proponents of those "first-class-of-class" concept? The large consulting powerhouses! At satisfactory, let me concede, benchmarking let you make small incremental (additive) progress, however that is not what you need. What you want is exponential (geometric) progress. Now that you have study the top three motives why you ought to by no means do benchmarking, do not waste time with benchmarking. For any new project you want to initiate, begin with a smooth slate. Yes, reinvent the wheel. Remember, Apple reinvented the smartphone with the iPhone, Starbucks reinvented espresso homes, and you could reinvent yours. Go and do it.