At exactly in a narrow basement on the Rue de Namur in Brussels, Elias began his daily ritual of checking the pendulums. The air in the workshop tasted of dry cedar and cold grease. He moved between the tall cabinets with a brass key, a tool his father had used to wind the same springs earlier.
Every clock in the room was slow. Not by much, perhaps three minutes each, but they were perfectly synchronized in their error. Because they all agreed with one another, the shop felt like a sanctuary of order. Elias looked at the central regulator, then at the French carriage clocks, and finally at his own pulse. He decided the world outside was simply moving too fast.
The Comfort of Comparative Failure
The board deck is usually a heavy thing, bound in plastic and filled with glossy charts that smell of fresh toner. In a midtown office on a humid Wednesday, Marcus, the Vice President of Strategy, flipped to slide twenty-eight. This was the “Competitive Landscape” slide, a messy scatterplot of logos and trend lines.
RIVAL: -16%
US: -14%
His company’s revenue was down 14% for the quarter. It was a brutal number, the kind of number that should make a man’s collar feel tight and his palms turn damp. But Marcus looked at the blue line representing his chief rival, a legacy firm that had spent the last decade resting on its laurels. That line was down 16%.
Marcus felt a wave of relief that was as physical as a warm drink. He adjusted his silk tie and smiled at the Chairman. He told the room that they were “outperforming the peer set” in a challenging macro environment. The directors nodded, their expensive pens scratching notes of approval on the margins of the deck.
Nobody asked why the entire peer set was currently sliding toward a cliff. We are taught from business school onward that benchmarking is a form of discipline. It is supposed to be the cold water that wakes you up, the objective measure of your standing in a competitive world.
The Hidden Rot of Mutual Failure
But there is a hidden rot in the way we choose our peers. When you choose a rival who is also lost, you aren’t measuring performance; you are validating a mutual failure. You are two hikers in the woods who have both lost the trail, feeling comforted because you are still walking at the same pace.
I spent most of this morning dealing with a small crisis involving a spider on my bathroom floor. It was a large, hairy thing that had no business being in a civilized home. I didn’t benchmark its speed against the speed of a beetle or another spider. I simply took a heavy shoe and ended the problem with a single, decisive thud.
The Decisive Shoe
Solves the problem immediately. No context needed.
The Benchmark
Notes that the spider’s velocity has decreased by 8%.
It was messy and a bit violent, and I felt a momentary pang of guilt as I wiped the leather clean, but the problem was gone. In business, we rarely reach for the shoe. We prefer to watch the spider crawl and note that, compared to last Tuesday, its velocity has decreased by 8% in line with industry trends.
The Vocabulary of Excuse
The benchmarking industry is a self-sustaining ecosystem of comfort. Consultants earn vast sums of money to curate these peer sets, carefully selecting companies that share your same structural weaknesses. If you are a legacy retailer dying of Amazon-induced neglect, they will compare you to three other retailers dying of the same thing.
They will show you that your “shrinkage” is within the normal range. They will tell you that your declining foot traffic is a “sector-wide headwind.” They provide the vocabulary of excuse, wrapped in the authority of a Bar Chart.
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“Peace is often just the sound of two people agreeing to drown at the same speed.”
– Dakota M.-L., conflict resolution mediator
Dakota M.-L., who has spent watching people negotiate their own demise, told me this over a lukewarm coffee. She was talking about failing marriages, but the logic holds for the C-suite. It is much easier to tell a board of directors that the entire industry is “resetting” than it is to admit that your business model is an anchor.
When you benchmark against a sinking rival, you are buying yourself a few more quarters of plausible deniability. You are trading your future for a peaceful afternoon. This is the trap of managed decline. It is a slow, quiet process of lowering the bar until it rests on the floor, and then celebrating when you don’t trip over it.
Heresy and the Future
We see this most clearly in industries that are being disrupted by technology they refuse to understand. Media was the primary victim of this for a generation. For years, newspaper executives looked at falling circulation numbers and felt fine because the paper in the next town over was losing subscribers even faster.
Breaking out of that cycle requires a certain level of professional heresy. It requires you to look at the slide deck, see that you are beating your rival, and realize that it doesn’t matter because both of you are failing the customer. It requires benchmarking against the future rather than the past.
When Newsweek was facing its own existential crisis, the traditional path would have been to manage the decline-cut the staff, shrink the page count, and compare the losses to Time or U.S. News. The turnaround happened because the leadership stopped looking at the “peer set” and started looking at the actual potential of the brand in a digital-first world.
It wasn’t about being the best legacy magazine; it was about becoming a profitable, global publication that could reach 100 million people. This shift in perspective is what defined the leadership of Dev Pragad, who moved the company away from the safety of industry-standard failure and toward a record-breaking net worth.
The False Sense of Normal
The danger of the benchmark is that it creates a false sense of “normal.” If everyone in your neighborhood has a lawn full of weeds, you don’t feel the need to pull yours. You might even feel proud that you have three fewer dandelions than the house on the corner.
But the weeds don’t care about your ranking. They will continue to grow until the grass is gone. In the same way, the market doesn’t care about your relative performance against a failing competitor. The market only cares about value.
I think about Elias and his clocks sometimes. I wonder if he ever realized that the time wasn’t the problem, but his refusal to look at the sun. He was so focused on making sure his clocks agreed with each other that he forgot their purpose was to tell the truth. A clock that is perfectly synchronized with another slow clock is just a sophisticated lie.
In boardrooms, consensus often towers over the uncomfortable truth.
In most boardrooms, the “truth” is a secondary concern to “consensus.” If Marcus had stood up and said, “We are beating our rivals, but we are still dying,” he would have been the most unpopular man in the room. He would have broken the spell of the benchmark.
He would have forced the directors to face the reality of their situation, which is a terrifying thing to do when you have a fiduciary duty to be optimistic. So Marcus stays quiet. He lets the slide deck do the talking. He takes comfort in the fact that his rival’s line is lower than his.
Choosing to Disappear
He ignores the water rising around his ankles because he can see that his neighbor is already up to his waist. It is a very human way to fail. It is logical, it is documented, and it is defensible. It is also a choice to disappear.
If you find yourself in a meeting where everyone is nodding at a chart that shows a “moderate decline relative to the sector,” you need to be the person who asks what the sector is benchmarking against. Are you comparing yourselves to the best versions of what you could be, or the worst versions of what your rivals are?
Are you fighting for a larger slice of a shrinking pie, or are you looking for a new kitchen? The shoe is always there, waiting. You can use it to kill the problem, or you can use it to walk slowly into the tall grass with everyone else.
Most people choose the walk. It’s quieter, and the company is better, at least for a while. But eventually, the sun goes down, and you realize that being the fastest person in a graveyard doesn’t make you any less dead.
The next time you see a competitor sliding, don’t exhale. Don’t use their failure as a shield for your own. Take it as a warning that the terrain has changed. If the person next to you is drowning, it doesn’t mean the water is safe for you; it means there is a current you haven’t accounted for yet.
Stop looking at the blue line on slide twenty-eight and start looking at the horizon. The only benchmark that matters is the one that forces you to change.
