Benchmarking the Lean Enterprise: Organizational Learning at Work

Following the success of the Toyota Production System in the world of automotive manufacturing, the new business philosophy of the lean enterprise is gaining ground in that industry and in many others, among them construction; it appears to be positioned well to replace nearly a century of conventional or mass production practices. This study investigates the use of benchmarking in transforming a conventional organization into a lean enterprise. In this transformation, the management of knowledge and the practice of continuous learning and improvement figure prominently. From the perspective of benchmarking as a learning tool designed to reduce uncertainty in the organizational environment by reference to peer experience, the study distinguishes various forms of benchmarking and then addresses issues in knowledge management, information seeking and use, the diffusion of innovations, resistance to change, benchmarking strategies and practices, and benchmarking teams and protocols, concluding with a critique of its limitations.     

An analysis of ideomotor action.

This article presents a framework based on the work of R. H. Lotze (1852), W. James (1890), and A. G. Greenwald (1970) for understanding ideomotor actions that tend to arise when individuals watch others perform certain actions. Two principles of ideomotor action induction are distinguished: perceptual induction, in which people tend to perform the movements they see, and intentional induction, in which people tend to perform movements suited to achieve what they would like to see. In 3 experiments, ideomotor hand, head, and foot movements were studied while participants watched a ball traveling toward a target. Results showed strong support for intentional induction, weaker support for perceptual induction, and a strong impact of the effector studied. The representational basis of action induction (stimulus vs. goal representations) and the automaticity of the underlying processing (task-dependent vs. task-independent induction) were considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)