Idea 3 - Benchmarking If someone is doing something more successfully than you are, it makes sense to look over their shoulder and see what you can learn from them. US manufacturers started doing this when they realized that Japanese competitors were taking away their markets. It's called benchmarking and it's become so widespread among big companies that some business thinkers now caution against it. The history books point to Xerox as being the first large US Corporation to benchmark. That was in the late 1970s when, like many of its compatriots, it was feeling the competitive heat. It took all the key parts of the business, from production to sales and maintenance, and measured them against their counterparts in other companies, abroad as well as at home. If the performance of the other's process was better in some way - quicker, cheaper, more efficient - Xerox determined at least to match it. In so doing, it transformed its own overall performance and word s