Raynor likens the value of the Exceptional 100 to a map. Plugging in data about your company, you can determine where it stands and use that as a starting point for helping to make some critical decisions about how you will move forward.
For example, Raynor says, a $20 billion to $50 billion company may decide that after a decade of double-digit growth, it is reasonable to expect that it will be entering a period of slower growth. Yet looking at its relative growth, it may turn out to be in the 80th percentile of companies. That's certainly strong performance, he says, but not so good it leaves no room for improvement.
"It's not like there is nowhere left to go," Raynor says. "You may be prematurely taking your foot off the gas."
So the Deloitte methodology offers companies not just a way to assess where they stand but offers them guidance on making the changes that will make them better. Help in doing that is no small matter.
"Our research found that up to 80% of managers either over- or underestimate their company's relative performance or percentile rank," said Ahmed. "This misunderstanding can lead to misplaced efforts, such as an unnecessary focus on aggressive cost-cutting, as opposed to increasing margins through strategic differentiation to improve long-term profitability."
Every company dotes on a raft of performance measures. That's because no one measure fully describes how a company is doing. But it can be maddeningly difficult to sort through these different metrics and arrive at a cohesive picture of performance.
Then there's the issue of determining how well you are performing against your competitors, or against an even broader set of companies. Are you really world-class like your promotional literature promises, or are you just pretty good?
It is that multidimensional nature of performance that helped drive Michael Raynor, a director at Deloitte Services, and Mumtaz Ahmed, chief strategy officer at Deloitte, to develop "The Exceptional 100," a list of the top 100 U.S.-based publicly traded companies.