Look Like a Leader
What distinguishes the best-performing shops? Here are my impressions.
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In an earlier commentary, I argued that shops seeking to benchmark performance shouldn’t focus on the averages of other shops. A better focus is the range of variation around the averages. I cited a report on productivity that measured a phenomenon I have seen anecdotally—namely, manufacturers performing similar work for similar customers can show dramatic variation in efficiency and organizational effectiveness. Enough manufacturers achieve performance far ahead of their peers that merely being ahead of average is not necessarily a consolation. The measure of performance shops should aim for is to be close to—or among—the leaders.
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