No Comparison Judging your company against the competition could be fatal.

Comparisons are a source of endless illusion. As long as weappear to be doing better than someone else, we can feel that wemust be doing well, so we don't need to change. These illusionscan begin when we compare ourselves with our own past performance(rather than simply learning from it) or with the performance ofother organizations.

The companies we're comparing ourselves to may all beperforming at lower levels than the market requires. They mayall be doing it wrong. Since every organization is unique,another company's solutions may not apply to us. Imitatingothers may take too long or come too late.

This problem is compounded by the fact that we may not even knowwhat those we're comparing ourselves to are really like. We canallude that we know what these other organizations are doing, butwe may be basing our opinions on partial, incomplete or erroneousinformation.