Nowadays, many benchmarking best practice examples come from the highly competitive and innovative airline industry. According to Jackie Fry, Ian Humphreys and Graham Francis (2005), benchmarking is considered to be the most commonly used performance tool for increasing performance both for airline companies and airports worldwide.
Succeeding in today’s business environment involves not only having a strategy designed in a way that ensures the company’s success, but also using the proper methods to make sure the strategic decision-making process will be as accurate as possible. In order to arrive at such a result, managers should be aware of the biases that can appear within organizations and what techniques they can use to control or reduce them.
All businesses are in a continuous search for processes and quality improvements that will eventually lead them to achieving a superior level of performance in their activity.
Every company has a strategy regarding the objectives they want to achieve, but the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful strategy lies in the steps that are taken when formulating the strategy, more specifically in the first step, the external analysis. In order to facilitate this process, organizations can deploy a number of tools to perform an external analysis thoroughly.
1. SWOT
It is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Strengths and Weaknesses are used for the internal scan of the company, while Opportunities and Threats are part of the external scan. By analyzing the external environment, the company can better focus its internal resources to reduce the threats and capitalize on its opportunities.
When discussing about management errors, Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself. ” If we analyze the decision making process in companies all over the world, we find that mistakes are common, but what makes the difference between an excellent and an average manager, is the ability to find solutions for errors and learn from others’ mistakes.