Communication Best Practices at Dell, General Electric, Microsoft, and Monsanto

1. The Benchmarking of Organizational Communication Best Practices

1 THE BENCHMARKING OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION 1 The Benchmarking of Organizational Communication Best Practices Benchmarking is a process in which companies target key improvement areas within their firms, identify and study the best practices by others in these areas, and implement new processes and systems to enhance their own productivity and quality. Many leading companies are finding that in today’s market, you benchmark and improve or you don’t survive. (Kendrick, 1992:1) While leading-edge organizations have long understood and valued the benchmarking of best practices as a firm’s most important theoretical and practical learning tool (Port et al. 1992, 75; Taylor 1999, 1), the field of communication has only recently begun to pursue this strategy as an important learning tool (King and Cushman 1994, 1995, 1997). Benchmarking the organizational communication patterns involved in the best practices of leading-edge firms benefits us as a strategic tool by (1) identifying the critical success factors in each area studied; (2) providing clear quantitative and qualitative targets to shoot for in developing world-class performance; (3) creating an awareness of stateof -the-art content, implementing structures, and processes for effective communication; and (4) mapping the learning curve for continuous improvement processes within organizations (Altany 1990, 14). This book is one attempt to provide just such a knowledge base as a platform for understanding the organizational communication patterns involved in world-class performances. Our inquiry into the discovery of such patterns will proceed at both a theoretical and practical level by locating firms which by the consensus of experts manifest best practices (that is, world-class performances) in the areas of central concern to the development of communication theory and then employing the case studies method for benchmarking their performance. 1 2 DONALD P. CUSHMAN AND SARAH SANDERSON KING Benchmarking as a significant learning tool is grounded in three important assumptions: • that someone recognizes an insufficiency in his or her knowledge base regarding the theory and practice governing specific organizational communication activities; • that someone knows of an organization which has and is willing to share its best practices knowledge base; • that the person or persons recognizing the knowledge base insufficiency have the learning capability and implementation skills necessary to understand and implement the new knowledge base regarding best practices. The benchmarking of organizational communication best practices takes place in three general areas of organizational concern. First, Strategic Benchmarking seeks to discover the success various general communication strategies have in creating long-term stakeholder value. This is determined by measuring the effects of such strategies on a firm’s growth in sales, profits, market share, productivity , quality, inventory turns, motivation, and customer satisfaction. Second, Organizational Process Benchmarking seeks to discover one or more of a firm’s primary communication processes on the previously listed stakeholder outcome measures. Here such communication processes with stockholders, suppliers, and employees are explored in order to reveal world-class best practices. Third, Customer Benchmarking involves discovering the attributes which guide customer products or service choice, what firms are perceived to have these attributes, and which support services are needed to provide effective use of a product or service. This involves the benchmarking of organizational marketing, sales, and service communication processes and their effects upon organizational performance. In order to understand the value of the benchmarking of best practices as a learning tool, this inquiry will employ strategic, process , and customer benchmarking studies of organizational communication best practices. While 90 percent of the firms leading their respective market segments in the Fortune Magazine International 500 Survey attribute major portions of their competitive success to the benchmarking of best practices (Port et al. 1992, 75), several recent studies conducted in Europe, Asia, and the Americas report that 70 percent of all firms who attempt to benchmark best practices do not succeed (Kendrick 3 THE BENCHMARKING OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION 1992, 1). Such firms invest lots of time and money but fail to achieve their strategic objectives in their implementation. These studies suggest three primary factors which lead to a decline in performance after the benchmarking of organizational best practices: First, a firm’s learning capability. An insightful study undertaken by Ernst and Young and the American Quality Foundation documents the relationship between a firm’s learning capability measures and its ability to employ teamwork and benchmarking effectively. Only the firms with the highest learning skills could employ the benchmarking of best...