Forget Benchmarking

Posted by gracebakya on December 2nd, 2016

Forget benchmarking. At best, let yourself be benchmarked. If you have benchmarking as a key strategic driver, with the best case scenario you will excel at 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 league table. If this is what you want, fine.

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Benchmarking is a form of comparison with so-called best practices. Typically a company does the research for you, following pre-defined parameters 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. Assuming that the research is done thoroughly and that people are not trying to compare apples with pears, you can obtain any statistic you want and you will find yourself somewhere in the spectrum from bad to good. League tables in schools and hospitals in the UK and other countries are a form of benchmarking. In the pharmaceutical industry there is plenty of data available in measures such as R&D productivity,

http://binarymetabot.com/wholetones-christmas-album-review/ 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 have not 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 may happen in future. Benchmarking is loved by managers of the inevitable, people whose main priority in business is to manage things that otherwise would happen anyway. Managers should be paid to drive things that would not happen unless they were there. Organisations that put too much emphasis on benchmarking may miss the innovation train. Since benchmarking needs today's data (or, to be more precise, yesterday's) it may produce tunnel vision, in other words, the least visionary of visions.