Benchmarking America — a new book from Salvatore Babones.

Benchmarking exercises are widely used in the private sector to evaluate company performance.  Every company wants to have high revenues, low costs, and high profits — but how high, low, and high?  There are two ways to figure out what is possible.  The first is to construct a sophisticated theoretical model of your firm that tries to account for every possible variable that might affect its performance.  This approach would be difficult, expensive, and prone to error.  For a large, complex company it might not even be possible.

The second way to figure out what kind of performance is possible for your company is just to go out and compare your company to others.  This is a benchmarking exercise.  It’s a simple, straightforward, pragmatic way to find out how you’re doing.  Companies, consultants, and investors conduct benchmarking exercises all the time.  The easiest way to find out how you’re doing is to see how others are doing and compare.  If other, similar companies have higher revenues, lower costs, or higher profits than you do, you know there’s room for improvement.

A close examination of what others are doing will even give you ideas for how you can improve yourself.

Benchmarking America applies this pragmatic, comparative approach to understanding the problems of the American economy today and uncovering practical solutions to correct them.  The performance of the American economy in meeting the needs of the American people is benchmarked to that of peer countries like Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK as well as to its own performance in the past.  The US economy is subjected to a wide-ranging benchmarking exercise — and found lacking.

Coming in 2013.

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