Planning Review: Volume 21 Issue 1

How benchmarking goes wrong (and how to do it right)

Lawrence S. Pryor, Steven J. Katz

This producer of specialized industrial products with high margins was suffering from slow growth. So it benchmarked its sales effectiveness against four direct…

How process benchmarking supports corporate strategy

Gregory H. Watson

Benchmarking—gaining the knowledge of your company's relative position in key business processes and core competencies—is an essential responsibility of the strategic…

Benchmarking R&D productivity

Irv Krause, John Liu

Companies are now looking for more productivity at a faster pace from their research and development organizations. Nowadays, the time it takes to get an innovation to…

An American Express/IBM consortium benchmarks information technology

Patti Prairie

American Express, a leader in its use of information technology (IT), engaged the IBM Consulting Group to benchmark its IT management processes against 17 other major…

Benchmarking at the SunHealth Alliance

Tim R.V. Davis, Michael S. Patrick

Benchmarking is being incorporated into the strategic planning and quality improvement processess of many service businesses. A case in point is the benchmarking effort by…

Training managers to benchmark

Derek L. Ransley

Benchmarking seems to generate the biggest payoff in companies that use an in‐house expert to foster manager training, nursemaid projects, and help translate findings into action.

Questions to answer before benchmarking

H. Kevin Vaziri

Managers who have been through several bench‐marking projects have a mantra to remind them that the results are going to be worth the hard work. Their saying is: “Good…

The newest game in Vegas is strategic management

Bernard C. Reimann

Some 3,500 Academy of Management members met in Las Vegas in August so it should be no surprise that a number of the sessions dealt with adopting strategic management in…

The argument against adopting a “Process” mentality

Michael K. Allio

Process improvements like benchmarking and reengineering are side‐shows, not the main event, says internationally known pundit, Gary Hamel. Innovation is the real engine…