Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62215
Picking Perfect Peers the Benchmarking against peer schools is a time-honored way for b-schools to seek improvement. The key is to choose the right mix of diverse institutions for study and comparison. by James F. Fairbank and Giuseppe (Joe) Labianca illustrations by Dave Jonason 36 BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2003 Every business school is interested in continuous improvement. Administrators often get their best ideas for making strate- gic or comprehensive changes by benchmarking their own programs against schools that are much like their own. Yet some schools might expose themselves to even more innovative initiatives if they investigate institutions that aren't exactly peers, including schools or organizations that operate in less familiar ways. We recently conducted a survey on interorganiza- tional monitoring to learn how administrators choose schools to serve as benchmarking institutions. Our Web-based survey was e-mailed to deans, associate deans, and top administrators at all AACSB-accredited business schools, as well as major accredited interna- tional business schools—a total of 448 business schools. Seventy percent of the schools responded. We learned that most business schools compare themselves to institutions that are extremely similar to theirs in terms of "structural" factors: size of the school, region, religious affiliation, type of degrees granted (bachelor's, master's, doctoral), and owner- ship (public versus private). Those salient structural factors are related to major resource constraints. Schools also tend to compare themselves against institutions that are similar in "identity-related" factors. These include reputation, image, and val- ues in areas such as research, teaching, service commitments, and activities such as cooperative learning. Those factors help form the rich texture of the school's identity and often are crucial dur- ing the comparison process. An Innovative Approach Benchmarking against an identical school can be very efficient since similar business schools face many of the same challenges. What one adminis- trator learns from another institution will be fair- ly easy to transfer to his own business school. Further, when people are dealing with a com- plex, changing environment, they find it com- forting and validating to know that other busi- ness schools are facing equal challenges and making similar decisions. However, administrators encounter two key problems when they compare their schools only to institutions that are similar in both structur- al and identity-related ways. First, such a choice limits the diversity of information that emerges