The Benchmarking Book

Michael J. Spendolini forgoes the usual generalities of management theory in favor of a how-to practicality. The first edition of his book helped to establish the concept of benchmarking in the mainstream of organizational practice. For those of you who don't know, benchmarking is a continuous-improvement strategy that seeks to improve products, services or operations by comparing them with the best practices of industry competitors and other companies nationally and worldwide. Spendolini offers a five-step model that can be applied by any company. He also provides a helpful, step-by-step guide to applying the process, though he does get a little repetitive as he describes the model and details each step. But we [...] nevertheless recommend this book to managers and executives as perhaps the best benchmarking primer on the shelf.