Forget Benchmarking

Forget benchmarking. At best, let yourself be benchmarked. If you have benchmarking as a key strategic driver, with the best case scenario you will master the art of catching up. You will not invent the new breakthrough product, create a new market or be unique at what you do. OK, you may want to see your company at the top of the little league table. If it’s this that you want, fine.

Benchmarking is a form of comparison with so-called guidelines. Typically a company does the research for you, following pre-defined guidelines and measures, so you are eventually able to compare yourself with your competitors. It could be a productivity comparison, a quality comparison or any other performance comparison with others Apostille US Birth Certificate. Assuming that the research is done thoroughly and that people are not trying to compare oranges with pears, you can obtain any figure you want and you will find yourself somewhere in the array from bad to good. Little league tables in schools and private hospitals in the uk and other countries are a form of benchmarking. In the drug industry there is plenty of data available in measures such as R&D productivity, time to market, or, say, speed of the clinical trial programme.

The problem with benchmarking is that sometimes people make extraordinary efforts comparing themselves with others on a reality that is gone: the past. It is impossible to benchmark yourself against things that haven't happened yet. The future is not benchmarkable. Benchmarking is catching up. It is rear-mirror management, not future development.

Benchmarking also has the potential to block creativity since the efforts are focused on what is happening as opposed to what you can do in future. Benchmarking is loved by administrators of the inevitable, people whoever main priority in operation is to manage things that otherwise would happen anyway. Administrators should be paid to drive things that would not happen unless these were there. Establishments that put too much increased exposure of benchmarking may miss the innovation train. Since benchmarking needs today's data (or, to be more precise, yesterday's) it may produce canal vision, in other words, the least visionary of ideas.

I wonder whether Bill Checkpoints, founder of Microsof company, was benchmarking when in 1985 he stated that 640K of computer memory ought to be enough for everyone. Obviously, it was not benchmarking that saved him from this 'vision'. Kenneth Olsen, founder of the computer company Digital Equipment Corporation, was also benchmarking when in 1977 he said that there was no reason why anyone want a computer in their home. Undoubtedly the benchmarking consultants of the day could not find any computers in homes so the hypothetical benchmarking study would have confirmed the truth of Olsen's views. In 1876, Mister William Preece, chief electrical engineer of the British General Post office, had done their own benchmarking (although he did not know the term) and suggested that "the Americans had need for phoning but we do not; we have plenty of messenger boys". Likely the fictional benchmarking research of the day would have produced a little league table of 'fast to slow messengers'. Decca, the record company, must have also been benchmarking the musical market when they rejected the Beatles on the grounds that 'guitar music is on the way out'. I don't know, but I bet they even had 'hard statistical data'.

Business history is full of examples of where true innovation defies the expectations of today and the facts of the past. I can't imagine a benchmarking consultant doing research for Sony and finding that: (a) people wanted to have little battery powered boxes hanging from their belts with thin wires connected into their ears to play tapes in the pub when going to a cubicle, or (b) they actually found examples of that strange behaviour in the market and reported information to Sony. The Walkman was not invented on the back of benchmarking (or general market trends for that matter).