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"If TI only knew what TI knows," lamented Jerry Junkins, the late chairman, president, and CEO of Texas Instruments. Lew Platt, chairman of Hewlett-Packard, echoed this with "I wish we knew what we know at HP." Junkins and Platt recognized early what many other managers are just beginning to realize: that inside their own organizations lies, unknown and untapped, a vast treasure house of knowledge, know-how, and best practices. If tapped, this information could drop millions to the bottom line and yield huge gains in speed, customer satisfaction, and organizational competence.
While TI, like many corporations, has been vigorously pursuing knowledge and best practices by benchmarking with other organizations, it is now putting as much effort into "internal benchmarking"-the process of identifying, sharing, and using the knowledge and practices inside its own organization. Internal benchmarking and transfer of best practices is one of the most tangible manifestations of knowledge management-the process of identifying, capturing, and leveraging knowledge to help the company compete. Sharing and transfer is also tangible evidence of a learning organization-one that can analyze, reflect, learn, and change based on experience.
The need isn't new. Executives have long been frustrated by their inability to identify or transfer outstanding practices from one location or function to another. They know some facilities have superior practices and processes-and the results to prove it-yet executives continue to see operating units reinventing or ignoring solutions and repeating mistakes. In one well-known example, General Motors entered into a joint venture with Toyota at the NUMMI assembly plant in Fremont, California, to learn its approaches and transfer them to other locations in GM. Despite leading hundreds of "study missions" of GM managers and union members through the NUMMI plant, practices didn't transfer to any great extent. GM had to create a completely new division, Saturn, to begin to capitalize on the new forms of work and labor relations created at NUMMI and elsewhere.
You would think that these better practices would spread like wildfire to the entire organization. They don't. As William Buehler, senior vice president at Xerox, said, "You can see a high-performance factory or office, but it just doesn't spread. I don't know why." One Baldrige winner told us, "We can have two plants right across the street...