20 Mar 2008 0541H

Monkey see, monkey do

A few weeks back I did an internal presentation on benchmarking. Isn’t benchmarking just shorthand for plagiarism? No. It shouldn’t be a kneejerk apeing of what someone else is doing just because they seem successful for it. In this article from Harvard Business School, the authors warn against the dangers of casual benchmarking. In the practice I advocate, benchmarking is extremely rigorous: first, understand what is the context for a given practice, then we take things apart and we figure out how they work, why they work, why they break. When this is done with sufficient rigor, i.e. correctly, you can create best of breed practices. But it doesn’t come from just blindly mimicking something just because “it’s cool.”

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1 response to "Monkey see, monkey do"

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23 Apr 2008 1323H

Simon - presentations trainer writes:

Hi - I’m inclined to agree that benchmarking is often done in a half-hearted “let’s copy them” way: would it be possible to see your presentation slides? (Yes, as a presentation trainer I know that the slides aren’t the presentation but at least then we could have a conversation about it! :) )

Simon

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