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Feature Article

Societal Responsibility

Without socially responsible leaders, organizations striving towards performance excellence in today’s market will get left behind.  Ethical behavior and considerations for societal well-being are crucial elements to running a quality business.  Leaders need to be role models for their organization by focusing on ethics and the protection of public health, safety, and the environment. The protection of these three elements includes the organization’s operations, as well as the life cycles of products.  Effective planning will help to anticipate adverse impacts from production, distribution, transportation, use, and disposal of products.

Effective planning will help to prevent problems, provide a response if problems occur, and make available information and support needed to maintain public awareness, safety, and confidence.  Henry Ford Health System, one of the winners of the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award for Health Care, know how to think about these big-picture issues; HFHS community benefit initiatives have increased by almost 78 percent since 2006.  HFHS’s commitment to patient safety is further emphasized through its evidence-based global harm campaign (evidence-based medicine integrates an individual doctor’s examining and diagnostic skills for a specific patient with the best available evidence from medical research) to reduce or eliminate some 23 sources of harm.  According to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, this program is a national best practice.  HFHS’s performance in relation to overall global harm has improved from approximately 60 harm events per 1,000 patients in the first quarter of 2008 to 40 harm events per 1,000 patients in the second quarter of 2011.  A prime example…

Joseph A. De Feo | January 26th, 2012 | Continued

Feature Article

Hire for Qualities, Teach Skills

Although 9% of Americans are unemployed, 52% of organizations recently surveyed by ManpowerGroup are having trouble filling positions. The problem is not that unemployed workers are living large off their unemployment benefits but that they lack the exact skills employers need.

At FastCompany, Donna Wells, CEO of Mindflash, suggests a solution that does not involve blaming our education system or the work ethic of our labor force: Hire for the qualities you seek and teach the skills they need.

Wells provides an example. Con-way Freight of Salt Lake City couldn’t find and hire qualified drivers fast enough to meet its needs. Rather than being chronically understaffed—and losing revenue as a result—it started free driving schools at 75 of its truck yards and guaranteed a job for anyone who passed the training. In the first 18 months, it graduated nearly 440 drivers and has retained 98% of them.

The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions that you can use to evaluate your hiring and training processes:

  • What are your key human resource or workforce plans to accomplish your short- and longer-term strategic objectives and action plans?
  • How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs, including skills, competencies, and staffing levels?
  • How do you recruit, hire, place, and retain new members of your workforce?

As Wells concludes, “With technology and industries shifting so quickly, our economy’s open positions aren’t necessarily a perfect fit for our unemployed workers. Rather than simply wishing that mismatch away, businesses need to embrace training to reduce it.”

To read more about building a…

Steve George | November 21st, 2011 | Continued

Feature Article

Baldrige Model: How do you manage information, knowledge and information technology?

Item 4.2 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you build and manage your knowledge assets. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.

Your organization needs processes for:

  • Managing the accuracy, integrity, reliability, timeliness, security, and confidentiality of data, information, and knowledge
  • Making needed data and information available to employees, suppliers, partners, collaborators, and customers
  • Managing organizational knowledge
  • Ensuring that hardware and software are reliable, secure, and user-friendly
  • Ensuring the continued availability of information systems during emergencies

Best practices to consider:

  • The organization has identified what information its employees, customers, suppliers, and partners need to improve performance and has deployed processes that get the right information in the right hands at the right time.
  • In a learning organization knowledge is currency, which is why a learning organization has processes for collecting and transferring knowledge and identifying, sharing, and implementing best practices.
  • Critical data and information are backed up and stored offsite in case of an emergency, and the backup system is checked on a scheduled basis to ensure reliability.

Common problems areas:

  • The right information either is not collected or is not distributed to the right people when it can be useful.
  • Knowledge is lost when employees leave the company.
  • No processes exist to identify the organization’s knowledge assets or to collect and use that knowledge.
  • The organization does not pursue, value, or share best practices.

To read more about building and managing your knowledge assets, click on these articles:

…

Steve George | May 30th, 2011 | Continued

Feature Article

Make Your Job Better with Baldrige

Innovation and Communication

Two of the key elements in a world-class organization, as defined by the Baldrige model, are innovation and communication. In “Eight Communication Traps That Foil Innovation” (HBR, January 12, 2011), Georgia Everse, who was the chief communications officer for Steelcase, argues that innovative ideas, initiatives, and products need smart communications to succeed. She proposes eight traps to avoid as you innovate. Here’s the positive action you can take to avoid those traps:

  1. Link innovation to your mission and vision. Projects are more likely to succeed if they support your organization’s reason for being.
  2. Make your thinking visible. Create a space where project teams can post charters, objectives, process diagrams, measurement trends, prototyping efforts, etc. to help teams stay on track, reinforce their goals, and bring new stakeholder quickly up to speed.
  3. Follow well-defined innovation processes. Develop and refine innovation processes to ensure consistent progress and results.
  4. Follow well-defined communication processes. Don’t wait until the team is ready to hand the innovation off for production or marketing or integrating it into your culture. Communicate from the start the opportunities, the options being explored, progress on the project, and your innovative solutions.
  5. Bring the future to life. “Tell stories and create experiences that put [internal stakeholders] in the role of the customer, where they can touch and feel a prototype of the new product or service.”
  6. Share insights into customer wants and needs. “The best ideas are born out of a discovery process that unveils insights into the behavior patterns of people.” Those insights are valuable to other parts of your organization, too.
  7. Build…

Steve George | January 13th, 2011 | Continued

Feature Article

Get The Baldrige Edge

My focus for the past twenty years has been on understanding how the Baldrige model gives those who use it a competitive edge, not just at the organizational level but at the personal level… Because there’s something different about these strategic performers that gives them an advantage over the short-term plodders around them.

I’ve written four books on the Baldrige model and worked with five Baldrige Award winners and with Baldrige experts in dozens of organizations. I’ve studied how they think and act and have discovered the secrets that transform them from plodders to strategic performers.

Right here, right now, you can secure your job…make it better…and advance your career with The Baldrige Edge.

Whether you are an employee, manager, or leader, there are two ways to look at achieving your goals at work. You can either think like a short-term plodder and believe that your organization will recognize your talents and hard work and reward you…eventually…maybe… OR you can start acting like a strategic performer, knowing that you will get ahead by taking charge of your job and your career. As a strategic performer, you ask the right questions. You provide insightful answers. You stop wasting your days on the same old drudgery, reacting to the latest problems or the newest crisis, and you see the big picture. You understand where you can make the greatest difference and you seize that opportunity and your job becomes richer, more fulfilling, more fun, and more rewarding.

The beliefs that create success are consistent with the way…

Steve George | January 12th, 2011 | Continued

About this Site

Steve George

Steve George founded Baldrige.com, the leading online community for Baldrige supporters, visitors interested in Baldrige, and anyone who wants to build a well-run organization.

Steve wrote his first award application in 1989 and has since worked with five Baldrige Award recipients, several state award winners, and dozens of other organizations including hospitals, manufacturers, service companies, small businesses, nonprofits, colleges, an army base, and a district court.

A trained Baldrige examiner in 1996, Steve has provided Baldrige training and written and edited Baldrige case studies.

He is also the author of four Baldrige-related books.

His goal for Baldrige.com is to build an online community for sharing information, answering questions, and promoting the Baldrige model as a proven approach to achieving performance excellence.

Imagine a world in which the organizations we buy from, supply, work for, and receive services from are well-run and high-performing. We aim to support that vision by providing:

Information You Need to Build the Organization You Want

Other Recent Articles

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Juran Institute Acquires Baldrige.com

Juran Institute, Inc. is pleased to announce the acquisition of Baldrige.com into our family of quality solutions and services. Our legendary founder, Dr. Joseph M. Juran, was a particularly vocal advocate for the Baldrige program. Prior to the passage of the congressional act that created the Baldrige Award in 1987, he testified in front of Congress on behalf of creating the award to help bring the focus of quality to the United States. Dr. Juran was also one of the original overseers of the Baldrige Award process.  Juran Institute has offered its own staff in support of the Baldrige process, many of whom have participated in the roles of Judges, Sr. Examiners, and Examiners.

Let me personally thank Steve George for all of his contributions to this website and to the Baldrige process overall. We will continue to focus the site on the same principles that Steve did, which will be to offer insights and information on the Baldrige model as an archetype for performance excellence. We will offer articles, links, and information directly related to the Baldrige categories that will be both relevant and interesting to our readers. We also will have Steve join us from time to time as a guest author.

Baldrige.com will be managed by Joseph A. De Feo, President and CEO of Juran Institute, as well as Tom Huizenga, our General Manager and Baldrige examiner. Both of us were personally managed and coached by Dr. Juran prior to joining Juran Institute. We have led extensive careers in quality…

23Jan2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | Continued
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Juran Institute Acquires Baldrige.com

I am pleased to announce the sale of Baldrige.com to the Juran Institute. Founded by quality guru Dr. Joseph M. Juran in 1979, the Juran Institute offers a broad range of services to help organizations improve performance, including Baldrige Assessment and consulting, Lean and Six Sigma, change management, quality planning, team building, and the Juran Management System. You can learn more about the company here.

Dr. Juran was a vocal advocate for the Baldrige program. I interviewed him in 1991 for my first book on the Baldrige model and he was kind enough to write a reference for the book. At the end of the interview, he not only invited me to his annual conference, then called IMPRO, but he offered to pay all of my expenses to attend. Before the conference, Dr. Juran delivered, “Making Quality Happen,” which remains one of the most informative sessions I’ve ever taken part in about the value of a systems approach to quality management and improvement.

I quoted him in my book, The Baldrige Quality System: “Prior to the Baldrige Award, any company that didn’t have a quality revolution was confused. Quality consultants were tugging them in different directions. We lost a decade that way. The criteria can become the focal point around which the renaissance can be built.”

Dr. Juran’s prediction has not come true—yet. While Baldrige still has the potential to inspire a quality and performance renaissance, it has not gained the traction enjoyed by programs such as Lean and Six Sigma, in part because…

23Jan2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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Benefit-to-Cost Ratio for Baldrige: 820-to-1

A new study of the net social value of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program concludes that the program “creates great value for the U.S. economy.”

Economists Albert N. Link from the University of North Carolina and John T. Scott from Dartmouth College published their evaluation of 45 Baldrige Award applicants on December 16, 2011. The report is available here (pdf). The Baldrige program asked the 274 organizations that submitted applications from 2007 to 2010 to participate in the study and 45 accepted the invitation. Link and Scott used a counterfactual evaluation method to determine the benefit-to-cost ratio, asking what the private sector would have had to invest to achieve the same level of benefits through the Baldrige program. Benefits were realized in three areas:

  • Savings to the applicants in investment costs to achieve the same level of benefits from their performance excellence strategies as they realized from the Baldrige program
  • Gains by consumers in greater satisfaction from higher quality products and services
  • Gains to the economy from saving scarce resources because the Baldrige Criteria were available

As I understand it, the counterfactual evaluation case made by the study is that organizations that integrate Baldrige increase demand because they offer higher quality products and services and they reduce costs because of more efficient operations. They earn more and spend less.

Link and Scott describe the methodology in their report. They concluded that the ratio of social benefits to social costs among the 45 organizations that responded to the survey was 351:1 while the ratio for all Baldrige Award…

19Jan2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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A Systematic Approach to Change

The decision to do a Baldrige assessment is a decision to change the organization. Questions will be asked that prompt leaders to reconsider the way they do things. Gaps in the day-to-day conduct of business will be exposed. Unacceptable results will shine light on ineffective processes. Cursed with new knowledge, senior leaders can either ignore it and accept that the current management system is unable to achieve the results they desire or embrace change.

The opportunities for improvement revealed by a Baldrige assessment contain the logic for acting upon them: Your results are flat or negative because this or that process is broken. Fix the process and improve your results. Measure your progress. Validate it with your customers. Repeat.

Unfortunately, the logic of the change is usually lost to everyone but the leaders who enact it, which can render it ineffective. In a recent article on Forbes, author Carol Kinsey Goman explains why human beings resist change. According to brain analysis technology, our work habits are controlled by a part of the brain called the basal ganglia. When we do things the way we’ve always done them, we feel good. Change stimulates the prefrontal cortex, which is linked to the amygdala, which controls our “fight or flight” response. When change overwhelms the prefrontal cortex, the amygdale triggers physical and psychological disorientation and pain. Even if we know logically that a change is necessary and positive, our brains can react negatively.

Goman offers six suggestions for helping your workforce handle change:

  1. Trust people to see the…
16Jan2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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10 Insights into Strategic Planning

Joan Magretta wrote a guide to strategy guru Michael Porter’s work called Understanding Michael Porter. As she worked on the book, she kept a list of insights, including “that most companies think they have a strategy when they don’t,” as she noted in an article on HBR.

Here are her ten insights and how they relate to the Baldrige model:

  1. You gain a competitive advantage by creating unique value for customers. Customer-driven excellence is a Baldrige core value, defined as an organization’s performance and quality being judged by its customers. If customers rate your performance and quality high, you will gain a competitive advantage.
  2. Your strategy must also clarify what the organization will not do. The Baldrige model asks several questions about how you develop strategies that will help you prioritize your strategies.
  3. “Competition is about profits, not market share,” writes Magretta. You grow a company by increasing profits, not market share.
  4. Brilliant strategies will not lead to performance excellence unless you execute them. The Baldrige Criteria devote an entire section to strategy implementation.
  5. Good strategies are interconnected and build on core competencies. The Baldrige Criteria ask how your strategic objectives capitalize on your core competencies and balance short- and longer-term challenges and opportunities.
  6. While it’s important to be flexible, your organization must stand for and excel at something. You must have the resources and capabilities to execute the plan
  7. You need not predict the future to commit to a strategy.
  8. “Vying to be the best is an intuitive but self-destructive approach to competition,” Magretta writes.
  9. You need both a distinctive value proposition and…
12Jan2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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Baldrige Is a Continuous Improvement Program

Those leaders who decide to give Baldrige a spin often focus on the obvious step: conducting a Baldrige assessment. Some may apply for a state award or the Baldrige Award, but most do an internal assessment, which identifies strengths and opportunities for improvement. If the assessment is done right and professionally evaluated, the list of opportunities is long—much longer than any organization can address is one year. As a result, too many organizations only conduct that one assessment, thus missing their opportunity to build a world-class management system.

Baldrige Award winners integrate Baldrige by performing regular—usually annual—Baldrige assessments. The process of producing assessments and prioritizing and acting on the opportunities they reveal institutionalizes a culture of continuous improvement. It keeps everyone focused on what is most important for the organization to grow and excel. It improves the alignment of people and processes with the organization’s goals, objectives, and strategies. Best of all, it delivers results, as the award application summaries of Baldrige Award winners show.

IndustryWeek recently reported on a survey it conducted with TBM Consulting about the impact of continuous-improvement programs on three financial metrics: anticipated revenue growth, operating income growth, and cash flow over the past year. “Across the board, companies with no continuous improvement programs performed worse across all three measures,” Jill Jusko concluded here:

  • More than 50% of respondents with no continuous improvement program said they expect revenue growth to be 3% or less in 2012, compared to fewer than 20% of companies with mature continuous improvement programs.
  • Nearly half of…
9Jan2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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