They went, they saw and they learnt – but not what they expected. They learnt no new techniques or pieces of electronic wizardry, but discovered instead that some firms expected failure rates up to 100 times better than theirs or had absenteeism levels ten times lower and, in one comparable case, new product development times five times shorter. Standards were different, that is all.

This form of organized learning has recently acquired a label – benchmarking, the discipline of measuring yourself against best practice in any function or field, often in industries very different from your own. The label, however, reduces to a technique what surely ought to be an ingrained habit – to aim to be not just good enough but as good as can be, to look beyond oneself in setting standards for oneself, to shun complacency and the false comforts of talking only to people like oneself.