Learning is Not Imitation. (Dear Tom, I love you) – god, I don’t know how many companies I have given the ‚why benchmarking is bad‘ speech to. Most benchmarking is bad. It engenders those behaviors you really don’t want, i.e. striving to mediocrity, being ok with being ‚industry average‘, and measuring yourself against an invisible and presumably finite yardstick. Tom hates the word ‚best‘ because it implies there is a top spot, a king of the hill, that can be attained. Of course it isn’t true, best is a relative and subjective word, but most companies don’t seem to realize that. Learning means exploring, pioneering, discovering and internalizing your findings, and, guess what, improving and adapting (aka learning)