January 8, 2005

COPYING. KILLS. ORIGINALITY.

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

COPYING. KILLS. ORIGINALITY.

Benchmarking may improve business performance, but it can destroy the original thinking you need to differentiate your organization and grow.

Stop benchmarking to discover what you should do. Benchmark to discover what you should be different from.

In 2009, I wrote my first blog.

It was called “5 reasons why benchmarking prevents you from having new ideas.”

I thought benchmarking was nuts then.

I still do.

The process is simple.

Find an organization that’s really good at something. Study them. Figure out how they do it. Then copy the hell out of them.

But there’s an obvious problem.

If you’re copying what the best organizations are doing, how in the world are you ever going to become different from them?

🧠 You start with somebody else’s answer

That’s the fundamental flaw in benchmarking.

You study someone considered “best in class” and immediately trap your thinking inside their box.

Instead of asking:

What could WE do that nobody else is doing?

You ask:

How can we become more like THEM?

One creates.

The other copies.

Copying kills originality.

⏪ Best practice is the past

For something to become a “best practice,” somebody had to create it, prove it worked and become recognized for it.

Then everybody else discovered it.

By the time you’re benchmarking it, you’re studying history.

Meanwhile, the organization you’re copying may already be creating what’s next.

Best practices might make you more efficient.

But they won’t make you The ONLY One™.

🐑 Benchmarking feeds the herd

Company A studies Company B.

Company C studies Company A.

Pretty soon everybody is adopting similar processes, systems and approaches.

The herd gets tighter.

And customers are left asking:

What’s the difference?

Not much.

That’s the Herd of Sameness™ at work.

Being best of breed still leaves you in the breed.

💥 Improvement isn’t invention

Benchmarking asks:

How can we do this as well as the best organization does?

I’d rather ask:

What could we do that would make the best organization look at US and wonder what the hell we’re doing?

That’s where original thinking begins.

That’s Create Don’t Copy.

🔀 Make the benchmark your departure point

I’ve softened one part of my 2009 position.

Benchmarking isn’t completely useless.

It can show you where the performance bar currently sits.

Fine.

Study it.

Learn from it.

But don’t make the benchmark your destination.

Make it your departure point.

Find out what the best are doing and then ask:

What are we going to do differently?

What are customers craving that current best practices aren’t delivering?

What could we create that competitors would eventually want to copy from us?

🔥 The lesson

I didn’t know it when I published that first blog in 2009, but the idea underneath it would stay with me.

Being better isn’t enough.

Better keeps you in the comparison game.

Different changes the game.

So study the best if you must.

Then head somewhere they aren’t going.

Don’t aspire to be best of breed.

Be different than breed.

Don’t benchmark to discover what you should do.

Benchmark to discover what you should be different from.

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Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.

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Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.8.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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