The Benchmarking Workout [antikvár]

"There is no man so friendless but what he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths/' Baron Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, 1803-1873 Back in the early 1990s when we decided to write a book about bench- marking, few people in the UK and Europe had ever heard the word before, fewer still had any inkling of its meaning. Our book, Benchmarking for Competitive Advantage, first published in 1993, was an overnight success. In the week that it was published I spoke on the BBC Radio 4 program "In Business" about benchmarking. The result was that the switchboard was immediately blocked by business people trying to get hold of the book! In 1994 the Swedish, Spanish, and Italian versions of the book were published due to public demand, followed by the Indonesian version in 1995. Meanwhile, in 1994 I contributed to the video-based Business Toolkit, Benchmarking to Win. Other developments also took place as the benchmarking "Boom" devel- oped. New books were published by others jumping on the benchmarking bandwagon and soon politicians were using the term routinely in numer- ous and often conflicting ways, even within the same speech! Looking back on those days of heady innocence, it is interesting to note just how much the issue back then was all about "concept-sell." The world was not ready for detail of method, first it had to understand and be convinced of the need. Unfortunately, even today much of the literature on benchmarking has remained at the level of selling the concept. That, however, is no longer good enough - the need has changed. Increasingly, we find that people do understand the benchmarking issue, the need for external bench- marking. The need now is for a practical understanding and tools to set about doing it.