By calibrating their performance against that of their rivals using comparative studies and standardized indicators, companies lock themselves into costly compliance. When permanent “benchmarking” stifles innovation and exhausts teams.
1. The dizziness of the mirror: when the company only looks at its neighbors
It’s an image that has become trivial in the business world: a management committee gathered around a 120-page report commissioned from McKinsey, Gartner or Forrester. The document is full of “quadrant” charts, comparison matrices and percentile rankings. The central question is no longer “What is our vision for the next five years? »but “Where do we stand in relation to the top quarter of our sector? »
Designed in the 1980s as a learning tool to observe best industrial practices – history often remembers the Xerox method measuring its supply chain against mail order companies – benchmarking has become the first management reflex in the corporate world.
According to an extensive survey conducted by the Boston Consulting Group among international executives, more than 82% of companies with more than 500 employees declare that they regularly and systematically use benchmarking studies to validate their strategic choices, their salary scales or their technological architectures.
Problem: this managerial compass has turned into a defensive reflex. We no longer seek to overtake competitors; we first try not to move away from the average.
2. The hidden cost of uniformity: “The paradox of imitation”
The most direct effect of this permanent comparison is the erasure of all differentiation. By blindly reproducing “best practices” (best practices) defined by a handful of international consulting firms, companies end up selling the same services, with the same communication and the same internal organizations.
This phenomenon of homogenization, described by sociologists as “ mimetic isomorphism », has a direct economic cost:
- The erosion of margins: According to a study by the Harvard Business Review published on the analysis of 1,200 listed companies over ten years, companies that base their strategy mainly around competitive benchmarking see their average operating margin erode 1.8 times faster than those who base their model on indicators of internal innovation or unique customer experience.
- Technological waste: In the digital sector, the imperative to “do as the market does” produces aberrations. The study institute Gartner recently revealed that nearly 30% of professional software subscribed to by large companies (SaaS) are never used by employees. They were purchased solely because they were in the technology stack recommended by industry benchmarks.
“When ten banks or ten insurance companies use the same decision grids, the same decision-making AI software and the same recruitment criteria, they no longer create distinct value: they simply share the same strategic errors at the same time. »
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ L'ENGRENAGE DU BENCHMARKING │
│ │
│ Analyse comparative ──► Copie des "Best Practices" │
│ ▲ │ │
│ │ ▼ │
│ Perte de différenciation ◄── Pression sur les coûts │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
3. When metrics destroy meaning: the tyranny of KPIs
To benchmark, you have to quantify. Everything must be able to be translated into figures, Excel tables and dashboards (dashboards). This is where the drift becomes human and organizational.
In a report published by the Observatory of Corporate Social Responsibility (ORSE), 67% of middle managers surveyed believe they spend more time producing comparative performance reports (reporting) than to support the actual work of their teams.
This numerical obsession perfectly illustrates the famous Goodhart’s law : “When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure. »
- In the customer contact centersbenchmarking requires measuring the “Average Processing Time” (TMT). Result: advisors are encouraged to hang up as quickly as possible, degrading the actual resolution of the problem in favor of a speed indicator.
- In the human resourcesthe generalization of salary and time benchmarking produces increasing disengagement. According to the global study State of the Global Workplace from Gallup, disengagement at work would cost 8.9 trillion dollars to the global economy (or around 9% of global GDP), a loss largely attributable to bureaucratized management driven by dashboards disconnected from the field.
4. Unlearn comparison to reinvent audacity
Benchmarking is not inherently toxic: observing what is happening elsewhere is a sign of legitimate curiosity. But when it replaces business intuition, customer dialogue and risk-taking, it becomes a slow poison.
Several pioneering companies are today trying to break with this dogma:
Replace benchmarking with user listening:
Rather than scrutinizing the competition, industrial players are redistributing their study budgets towards direct ethnographic research with their users. The objective is no longer to know what the market is doing, but to identify unmet needs that statistical studies do not see.
Valuing the “singularity metric”:
Instead of evaluating a team on its compliance with industry standards, some organizations measure their “differentiation index”: how much of our service choices are impossible to find among our competitors?
Rehabilitate the right to long-term employment:
Permanent evaluation, based on inter-quarterly comparisons, encourages short-termism. To remedy this, we must give autonomy back to managers. This implies accepting phases of experimentation outside the framework, even when they cannot be measured using traditional grids.
Furthermore, artificial intelligence is preparing to automate and accelerate the production of comparative data. From then on, the real competitive advantage will no longer lie in the ability to analyze other people’s data. It will rather be based on the courage to assume one’s own choices and assert one’s uniqueness. Ultimately, it is better to favor imperfect originality than perfect imitation.
