Benchmarking Best Quotes

It's funny how people mark their lives, the benchmarks they choose to decide when the moment is more of a moment than any other. For life is made of them. I like to think the best ones of all are in my mind, that they run through my blood in their own memory bank for no one else but me to see.

The best leaders don’t care much about “benchmarking,” comparing their organization to others. They know theirs is not good enough, and constantly push to get better.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

This isolation has left Americans quite unaware of the world beyong their borders. Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced that they need to rectify this. Americans rarely benchmark to global standards because they are sure that their way must be the best and most advanced. There is a growing gap between America's worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand and the majority of the American people on the other. Without real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America's competitive edge and its political future.

Mitchell Maxwell’s Maxims • You have to create your own professional path. There’s no longer a roadmap for an artistic career. • Follow your heart and the money will follow. • Create a benchmark of your own progress. If you never look down while you’re climbing the ladder you won’t know how far you’ve come. • Don’t define success by net worth, define it by character. Success, as it’s measured by society, is a fleeting condition. • Affirm your value. Tell the world “I am an artist,” not “I want to be an artist.” • You must actively live your dream. Wishing and hoping for someday doesn’t make it happen. Get out there and get involved. • When you look into the abyss you find your character. • Young people too often let the fear of failure keep them from trying. You have to get bloody, sweaty and rejected in order to succeed. • Get your face out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Close your e-mail and pick up the phone. Personal contact still speaks loudest. • No one is entitled to act entitled. Be willing to work hard. • If you’re going to buck the norm you’re going to have to embrace the challenges. • You have to love the journey if you’re going to work in the arts. • Only listen to people who agree with your vision. • A little anxiety is good but don’t let it become fear, fear makes you inert. • Find your own unique voice. Leave your individual imprint on the world, not a copy of someone else. • Draw strength from your mistakes; they can be your best teacher.

I believe benchmarking best practices can open people’s eyes as to what is possible, but it can also do more harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing catch-up. As one seasoned Toyota manager commented after hosting over a hundred tours for visiting executives, “They always say ‘Oh yes, you have a Kan-Ban system, we do also. You have quality circles, we do also. Your people fill out standard work descriptions, ours do also.’ They all see the parts and have copied the parts. What they do not see is the way all the parts work together.” I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another “great person.

the basic metaphor of prototypes still seems apt to me. There are no answers or magic pills. There is no alternative to learning through experimentation. Benchmarking and studying “best practices” will not suffice—because the prototyping process does not involve just incremental changes in established ways of doing things, but radical new ideas and practices that together create a new way of managing.

everybody else. But it makes complete sense when you consider his perspective: he isn’t measuring himself against the other players; he is measuring himself against himself. The best leaders don’t care much about “benchmarking,” comparing their organization to others. They know theirs is not good enough, and constantly push to get better.

To be the best, you are required to benchmark yourself against something greater than what you are now.

Remember this: You are the benchmark of your success - you define it. Don't let anyone else define it because if you do, you will fail. Appreciate those who support you and challenge those who don't

Ignore what other people are doing. Ignore what’s going on around you. There is no competition. There is no objective benchmark to hit. There is simply the best that you can do—that’s all that matters.

Man's relation to pain changes with every significant shift in fundamental belief. This relation is in no way set; rather, it eludes our knowledge, and yet is the best benchmark by which to discern a race.

Physicians, nurses, and other caregivers often do not know the costs associated with their treatment protocols. And administrators rarely collaborate with them to develop outcome and cost measurements that would facilitate benchmarking and best-practice-sharing opportunities.

This isolation has left Americans quite unaware of the world beyond their borders. Americans speak few languages, know little about foreign cultures, and remain unconvinced that they need to rectify this. Americans rarely benchmark to global standards because they are sure that their way must be the best and most advanced. There is a growing gap between America's worldly business elite and cosmopolitan class, on the one hand and the majority of the American people on the other. Without real efforts to bridge it, this divide could destroy America's competitive edge and its political future.

The myriad activities that go into creating, producing, selling, and delivering a product or service are the basic units of competitive advantage. Operational effectiveness means performing these activities better—that is, faster, or with fewer inputs and defects—than rivals. Companies can reap enormous advantages from operational effectiveness, as Japanese firms demonstrated in the 1970s and 1980s with such practices as total quality management and continuous improvement. But from a competitive standpoint, the problem with operational effectiveness is that best practices are easily emulated. As all competitors in an industry adopt them, the productivity frontier—the maximum value a company can deliver at a given cost, given the best available technology, skills, and management techniques—shifts outward, lowering costs and improving value at the same time. Such competition produces absolute improvement in operational effectiveness, but relative improvement for no one. And the more benchmarking that companies do, the more competitive convergence you have—that is, the more indistinguishable companies are from one another. Strategic positioning attempts to achieve sustainable competitive advantage by preserving what is distinctive about a company. It means performing different activities from rivals, or performing similar activities in different ways.

Performance measure. Throughout this book, the term performance measure refers to an indicator used by management to measure, report, and improve performance. Performance measures are classed as key result indicators, result indicators, performance indicators, or key performance indicators. Critical success factors (CSFs). CSFs are the list of issues or aspects of organizational performance that determine ongoing health, vitality, and wellbeing. Normally there are between five and eight CSFs in any organization. Success factors. A list of 30 or so issues or aspects of organizational performance that management knows are important in order to perform well in any given sector/ industry. Some of these success factors are much more important; these are known as critical success factors. Balanced scorecard. A term first introduced by Kaplan and Norton describing how you need to measure performance in a more holistic way. You need to see an organization’s performance in a number of different perspectives. For the purposes of this book, there are six perspectives in a balanced scorecard (see Exhibit 1.7). Oracles and young guns. In an organization, oracles are those gray-haired individuals who have seen it all before. They are often considered to be slow, ponderous, and, quite frankly, a nuisance by the new management. Often they are retired early or made redundant only to be rehired as contractors at twice their previous salary when management realizes they have lost too much institutional knowledge. Their considered pace is often a reflection that they can see that an exercise is futile because it has failed twice before. The young guns are fearless and precocious leaders of the future who are not afraid to go where angels fear to tread. These staff members have not yet achieved management positions. The mixing of the oracles and young guns during a KPI project benefits both parties and the organization. The young guns learn much and the oracles rediscover their energy being around these live wires. Empowerment. For the purposes of this book, empowerment is an outcome of a process that matches competencies, skills, and motivations with the required level of autonomy and responsibility in the workplace. Senior management team (SMT). The team comprised of the CEO and all direct reports. Better practice. The efficient and effective way management and staff undertake business activities in all key processes: leadership, planning, customers, suppliers, community relations, production and supply of products and services, employee wellbeing, and so forth. Best practice. A commonly misused term, especially because what is best practice for one organization may not be best practice for another, albeit they are in the same sector. Best practice is where better practices, when effectively linked together, lead to sustainable world-class outcomes in quality, customer service, flexibility, timeliness, innovation, cost, and competitiveness. Best-practice organizations commonly use the latest time-saving technologies, always focus on the 80/20, are members of quality management and continuous improvement professional bodies, and utilize benchmarking. Exhibit 1.10 shows the contents of the toolkit used by best-practice organizations to achieve world-class performance. EXHIBIT 1.10 Best-Practice Toolkit Benchmarking. An ongoing, systematic process to search for international better practices, compare against them, and then introduce them, modified where necessary, into your organization. Benchmarking may be focused on products, services, business practices, and processes of recognized leading organizations.

Always give your best; today's great work is tomorrow's benchmark.

to make voluntary efforts to improve in the areas that the results revealed to be unsatisfactory and to benchmark the best practices of other organizations to better

On a daily basis the venture capitalist was not concerned with historical impact; he worked to create wealth for himself and his limited partners. However, among the Benchmark partners there was awareness that framing one’s professional raison d’être in the language of financial return meant that one was hostage to the vagaries of the market—and even when the market is buoyant, there is little that is soul-quenching about mere numbers. “The really big wins are where all the rewards come from,” Bob Kagle once pointed out, before eBay had gone public. The rewards he was referring to were the emotional ones, not the financial ones, and they were rewards derived not from a game of assuming personal risk—the venture guys had a portfolio across which risk could be spread—but from being backers of entrepreneurs, the ones who commercialized new technology and introduced new products and services—and were the ones who really took on risk. “Nine times out of ten they’re taking on some big, established system of some sort.” He dropped his voice for emphasis: If the individual entrepreneur won, even for the venture guys it produced an “exhilarating feeling”—he groped for the right words—“it’s confirmation that one person with courage can make a difference.” This was the minidrama Kagle and his colleagues had seen play out triumphantly again and again. The work itself did not have any neat demarcations of beginning, middle, and end. The funds seemed to be evergreen, fresh capital materializing as soon as the till was exhausted. The calendars of the partners, revolving as they did around looking at new business plans, meeting new entrepreneurs, considering new deals, gave a feeling of perennially beginning afresh. For them, it was the best place in the cosmos to get the first peek at the future.

If you are competitor focused, you tend to slack off when your benchmarks say that you are the best. But if your focus is on customers, you keep improving

In theory, containers on bare metal provide the best of all worlds. You get the efficiency /density of containers, the native management of VMs, and (according to some early benchmarks) nearly bare metal performance.

Benchmark & Best practice ist die akademische Schnulze für Copy & Paste.

The first time you click on Milestone, you will establish your benchmark date—the day you started to write your book, for example. Add an image to this milestone to attract fans and encourage engagement.

America’s Best 401k will not only provide you with a free fee analysis but also provide this complimentary benchmark.

Football was his passion, his obsession, the thing he knew best, and Serie A was considered the league that practised the most advanced defensive tactics since Sacchi. His Milan of the eighties were regarded as having set the benchmark in terms of work rate and defensive strategy over the previous two decades – and Pep was determined to learn as much as he could from his time in Italy.

In the Human society, we don’t have sticks. Here, an ideal leader is the person who develops the group and encourages them. It is based on the principle that people are doing their best and if they are failing then it means they need more support, guidance or development. People prefer to be encouraged, supported and rewarded, rather than being beaten. Of course there are standards to reach and benchmarks must be set and the consequences of not reaching them clarified.

Enrich Diversity-Avtar As an organization that is committed to build equitable and inclusive culture to sustain diversity, we suggest you start here. Whether you have policies and practices or you are looking to start your journey to inclusion, the best way to is to start with assessing yourself. It helps to chart the way forward when you understand where you are and what it will take to go further. Our Assessment frameworks are backed by years of deep research and insights from working with diverse organizations and teams across industries and geographies. Participate in the country’s largest DEI analytics exercises for an opportunity to be recognized as a Best Company and also to benchmark your practices against the Industry Best Practices.

You uncover the best research and study the highest achievers. Anytime you don’t know the answer, your answer is to go find your answer. In other words, by default, your first ONE Thing is to search for clues and role models to point you in the right direction. The first thing to do is ask, “Has anyone else studied or accomplished this or something like it?” The answer is almost always yes, so your investigation begins by finding out what others have learned. One of the reasons I’ve amassed a large library of books over the years is because books are a great go-to resource. Short of having a conversation with someone who has accomplished what you hope to achieve, in my experience books and published works offer the most in terms of documented research and role models for success. The Internet has quickly become an invaluable tool as well. Whether offline or online, you’re trying to find people who have already gone down the road you’re traveling, so you can research, model, benchmark, and trend their experience. A college professor once told me, “Gary, you’re smart, but people have lived before you. You’re not the first person to dream big, so you’d be wise to study what others have learned first, and then build your actions on the back of their lessons.” He was so right. And he was talking to you too. The research and experience of others is the best place to start when looking for your answer.

your first step to fracture the fear of investing more resources on growth is to track your finances on a monthly or quarterly basis. Your second step is to benchmark your growth against the right metric.

Instead of benchmarking your growth investment against customer lifetime value, benchmark against your bottom-line profits.

Earn Trust: Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders don’t believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best. Dive Deep: Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. Deliver Results: Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

And our more progressive clients, monitored by their CFOs, are starting to require a specific number of hours of ongoing education at all levels of the organization (we suggest 12 hours for the frontline; 25 hours for middle management; and 45 to 60 hours for senior leaders as a starting point). Worried about spending all that money on training only to watch your people go elsewhere? The research definitively shows that training and development increases loyalty. Besides, what’s the alternative? Do you really want your people not to be the best-trained for the jobs they have to do? And how much should you spend on training? It obviously depends, but 2% to 3% of your payroll is a good benchmark. Who should you spend it on? Senior leaders, middle managers, frontline employees? They all need training, but focus first on your middle management. In most growth companies, they have the hardest jobs and are critical to employee engagement and retention, yet get the least preparation for it.

A Maldives holiday gives you the opportunity to walk in the pristine white sands, throw them among your feet and keep your mind on the bustle of the waves of the ocean at an ideal level of relaxation. Is it possible that there is more fun than we do in the Maldives? The charming atmosphere and relaxing aura are combined as a perfect match to the heavenly connection which you share with the love of life which speaks volumes of honeymoon tour packages on the Maldives. The honeymoon packages from India to the Maldives are made to perfectly suit your needs and offer you an excellent vacation. In comparison to the experience that awaits you, the prices of the Maldives online Honeymoon packages are fully justified. It is known that traveling brings people together as we grow on each tour. With our Maldives honeymoon packages, a special tour with your better half can be extra special. The shades of the darkness and dawn of this land are striking like a painting; you can visit the Maldives for an unforgettable holiday with Benchmark holiday online packages. This is a panoramic place to capture new beginnings in perfect strokes of green and blue with all-new aquatic and turquoise shades. The grace of romance easily sweeps into the heart while hunting for the best packages of Maldives honeymoon. To plan your best holiday online, choose a Maldives tour package, at affordable prices too. We give you the ability to recall our legacy and to enjoy it, to explore and celebrate life in the best online packs in the Maldives.

Without objective benchmarks for right and wrong, this is about the best a world ruled by subjective truth can do: accept morality defined by the mob. Whoever controls our means of communication and information arbitrates what's true and what's false, what's right and what's wrong, and who's canceled and who's not.

Amazon’s Leadership Principles6 Customer Obsession. Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers. Ownership. Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say, “that’s not my job.” Invent and Simplify. Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here.” As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time. Are Right, A Lot. Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs. Learn and Be Curious. Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them. Hire and Develop the Best. Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice. Insist on the Highest Standards. Leaders have relentlessly high standards—many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high-quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed. Think Big. Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers. Bias for Action. Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking. Frugality. Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense. Earn Trust. Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

The Earn Trust leadership principle exists in part to prevent this behavior from occurring. It states, “Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.” But these meetings, in the early days, clearly exemplified where we failed to live up to that principle. The original, well-intentioned meeting was set up to improve the software systems from one week to the next. But it gained a life of its own, and sometimes turned a roomful of smart people with probing questions into an angry mob, devouring those who could make a difference and robbing them of their very will to succeed.

What are the internal capabilities related to data and AI? •​What were the KPIs and goals for the last twelve months? •​What are the current processes for solving the problem? •​How is performance being monitored and reported? •​How can we benchmark goals moving forward? •​What are industry benchmarks and best practices? •​What opportunities exist to create a competitive advantage? •​What technologies are being used? •​Review current tools and processes to address the business challenge •​Document the existing technology stack, including costs, capabilities, and utilization

Chapter 6 offers up strategies to improve decisions about when to quit, including the importance of tackling the hardest part of a project first, as well as ways to develop benchmarks, criteria, and signals, called kill criteria, that will help ensure you quit sooner when persisting is no longer in your best interest.

Ignore “Google” As one of the best known companies in the world and because it’s often cited as a pioneer in adopting OKRs, Google is always held as a benchmark in content and methodology for OKRs. Our suggestion is that you ignore any reference to Google in implementing your OKRs. First of all, things that work for Google might not necessarily work for your company. Second, our empirical research with more than 20 Google employees has shown that there’s no homogeneous format for OKRs within the company, or between departments (e.g., how sales or product treats the subject) or across geographies (e.g., how Brazil, the US, and Europe address the issue). We’ve even found that four of those people that dind’t even know what OKRs were, and many who used OKRs as a high-level task list, which it’s NOT. Some official Google resources on OKRs, such as their human resources website, re:Work, explain the methodology simplistically and give out terrible OKR examples (one suggested Objective is “Eat 5 Pies”). Finally, don’t learn about management from companies that don’t really need to be well-managed. Google is a money minting machine because of its Adwords advertising business, and it really doesn’t matter if it has a strategy or not, or how well it executes it: Cash will keep pouring in. For execution lessons, look at tougher businesses, like retail and manufacturing. That’s where management really can make or break a company.

We are neither robotically systematic nor wholly idiotic when making investment decisions. To be sure, we do our best to remain objective and make good decisions, but we are strongly influenced by our cognitive limitations and the cloudy lens through which we see the world. But behavioral approaches, which showcased the limitations of our mental computers, simultaneously gave us the notion that what we consumed mattered greatly.

Pop quiz: What is the best predictor of the size of a retirement nest egg? What’s that you say, performance? Wrong! I’m sorry but the correct answer was “deferral rate,” but thanks for playing. The way that goals-based investing increases deferral rates (and thus, wallet share) is by couching investment in terms of personal meaning… Rather than speaking in sterile terms that rob wealth of its holistic meaning, use your goals as the benchmark and see how much easier saving becomes.

The best Slow Fixes use targets judiciously. ExxonMobil tracks the number of near misses without turning them into a benchmark for performance across the company. Why? To avoid targets becoming an end in themselves.

A 20 percent loss takes the value of one hundred down to eighty. To return to one hundred, the manager needs a 25 percent return (100/80 = 1.25). Then the investor would still lose two years of 4 percent compounded return to achieve the benchmark. So, to get back to the benchmark, the manager would need to make 35 percent (1.25 × 1.04 × 1.04 = 1.352) to make up for a 20 percent loss. Almost twice the loss!

The best part of being a valet is getting to drive some of the coolest cars ever to touch pavement. Guests came in driving Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Rolls-Royces--the whole aristocratic fleet. It was my dream to have one of these cars of my own, because (I thought) they sent such a strong signal to others that you made it. You're smart. You're rich. You have taste. You're important. Look at me. The irony is that I rarely ever looked at them, the drivers. When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, " Wow, the guy driving that car is cool." Instead, you think, "Wow, if I had that car people would think I'm cool." Subconscious or not, this is how people think. There is a paradox here: people tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked or admired. But in reality those other people often bypass admiring you, not because they don't think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired. The letter I wrote to my son after he was born said, "You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I'm telling you, you don't. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does--especially from the people you want to respect and admire you." It's a subtle recognition that people generally aspire to be respected and admired by others, and using money to buy fancy things may bring less of it than you imagine. If respect and admiration are your goals, be careful how you seek it. Humility, kindness, and empathy will bring you more respect than horsepower ever will.

You continue to not be and asshole, Kyung." "I do my best to maintain that benchmark.

We analyzed the ten tech companies worth over a billion dollars that went public in 2014 and 2015, and the average company spent a jaw-dropping $0.72 on sales and marketing for every $1.00 of sales during the three-year hypergrowth period before going public. As a matter of fact, one of the companies, Box, spent $1.59 for every $1.00 in sales! You’re probably wondering, how does a company like Box justify spending more money on sales and marketing than they generate in sales? The answer is “customer lifetime value.” Once Box mathematically proved that they could acquire a customer for less than the lifetime value (LTV) of that customer, they raised a war chest of investment capital and didn’t care if they spent more on sales and marketing than they generated in annual sales, because they knew that they would generate a big return in the long run. You probably don’t have access to a massive war chest of investment capital, but that doesn’t mean you are unable to invest more resources on growth. Instead of benchmarking your growth investment against customer lifetime value, benchmark against your bottom-line profits. Here is a list of financial scenarios and corresponding actions: If you desire growth and have a profitable business, operate at a break-even point and reinvest the profit, or a portion of the profit, back into growth. If you are running a break-even or unprofitable business, spend some time going through your expenditures looking for redundancies or unnecessary expenses. If you cannot find any opportunities to save money, prepare yourself to take a temporary pay cut (you can time this around your tax refund or right after your busy period if your business has seasonality). If you are unable to take a temporary pay cut, prepare yourself to work some extra hours (start by batching activities so you can spend a day per week working from home, and use the time you save when not having a work commute to invest in growth). If you are unable to take a temporary pay cut AND unable to work any extra hours, then read the paragraph below.

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

Like any good worker, you have goals and benchmarks. Your goal is to be the best at everything and the most liked by everyone.

An Alternative to Goals A reporter once asked an official from Toyota whether the company achieved “six sigma” quality—a defect rate of around 3 in a million and also the name of a quality improvement methodology that is currently fashionable. His answer typifies the Boyd approach to goals: Basically, I would say that because of our evolutionary concept, whatever we were doing becomes the benchmark for what we do next. We hold onto what we were doing so that it becomes maintainable and it is the new steady state.140 This may seem like a masterwork of obfuscation, but it is entirely consistent with Toyota’s overall guiding concept: The Toyota Production System, quite simply, is about shortening the time it takes to convert customer orders into vehicle deliveries.141 This is one of the best vision / focusing statements in the world of business. Instead of setting arbitrary goals, it tells everybody who works for Toyota that whenever they are in doubt about what to do, take the action that will reduce customer-to-delivery span time. It sets a direction, not a goal, since wherever we are this year, we will be better next year.

At the FBI, I spoke often about LeBron James. Even though I don’t know the man personally, I talked about him for two reasons. First, I believe he is the best basketball player in the world today. Second, he is never satisfied he is good enough. I have read that he spends every off-season working on some part of his game to improve it. At first glance, that seems crazy; he’s already better than everybody else. But it makes complete sense when you consider his perspective: he isn’t measuring himself against the other players; he is measuring himself against himself. The best leaders don’t care much about “benchmarking,” comparing their organization to others. They know theirs is not good enough, and constantly push to get better.

They define strategy as following best practices. Every industry has tools and practices that become widespread and generic. Some organizations define strategy as benchmarking against competition and then doing the same set of activities but more effectively. Sameness isn’t strategy. It is a recipe for mediocrity.

One technique I learned, actually from Brian Chesky at Airbnb, is to go find the five best people in Silicon Valley that do that role, and just have coffee with them. And just chat. In that dialogue, I think you form an ability to benchmark the differences between an A+ and a B+, so that when you meet new candidates, actual candidates, you can triangulate against the people you’ve met that are clearly stellar.