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Making Change Happen

This is a guest article by Arnie Weimerksirch. If you want to contribute an article to Baldrige.com, check out the guidelines here.

Change is difficult. In our personal lives we struggle to break bad habits, eat a healthier diet, or get more exercise. In spite of our good intentions, we often fail.

Organizations also find it difficult to change: Studies show that almost 85% of change initiatives fail. Even when faced with a crisis, many organizations are not able to make the changes necessary to survive. As W. Edwards Deming said, “Survival is not mandatory; it is purely optional.”

In 2004, on the 50th anniversary of the Fortune 500 list, only 71 of the original 500 remained on the list. Not all of them failed, of course, but the majority did. And they failed because they were not able to change with the times.

Why is change so difficult and what is the answer? One of the main reasons transformation initiatives fail is our love of management fads. In her book, Fad Surfing in the Boardroom, Eileen Shapiro defines fad surfing as “the practice of riding the crest of the latest management panacea and then paddling out again just in time to ride the next one; always absorbing for managers and lucrative for consultants; frequently disastrous for organizations.”

New management theories are constantly developed by “gurus”…

admin | February 8th, 2010 | Continued

Feature Article

If you are new to Baldrige…

…and you want to know:

  • what Baldrige is, click here
  • what to tell your boss about Baldrige, click here
  • what the Baldrige Criteria are, click here
  • the core values embedded in the Criteria, click here
  • the structure of the Criteria, click here

Steve George | November 4th, 2009 | 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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How Baldrige Award Winners Manage Performance


Sign up for a free report in the red box on the right–and be the first to receive our newest report, “Baldrige Award-Winning Process Management,” coming soon! To find out what you’re signing up for (it’s all good), click on the title of this article or on “Continued-” on the next line.

8Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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We Are All Idiots

I first saw poka-yoke in action when I helped Zytec with its Baldrige Award-winning application in 1991. The company had adopted  Japanese quality improvement approaches, including hoshin planning, to create robust processes for manufacturing power supplies.

Poka-yoke is Japanese for “avoid mistakes.” In “Poka-Yoke is Not a Joke” (Harvard Business Review, February 4, 2010), Michael Schrage tells the story of how Shigeo Shingo introduced his idea to Toyota assembly line workers, describing his clever techniques to make production processes “idiot-proof”:

“One of the plant’s employees burst into tears,” Schrage writes. “‘I am not an idiot!’ she cried. A stricken Shingo quickly recanted. He scrapped ‘idiot-proof’ in favor of declaring his initiatives essential to making assembly lines ‘mistake-proof.’”

The spell checkers in document creation software, from word processing to email creation to filling out online forms, “mistake-proof” your writing. They are poka-yoke devices that have saved us all from embarrassment. New luxury cars use technology to stop the car if the driver falls asleep or isn’t paying attention to how close the car in front is getting. That’s poka-yoke. Hospital employees draw an “X” on an arm or leg on which surgery will be performed. Poka-yoke.

Poka-yoke works because we are all idiots, especially when it comes to tasks we repeat so often that we stop paying attention to how we do them. Like writing. Or…

5Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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Baldrige for the 20-Teens

Gill Corkindale is an executive coach and writer based in London. She recently wrote an article about Baldrige for the Harvard Business Review entitled “A Better Decade for Business is Coming” (December 31, 2009). And she wrote it without using the word “Baldrige” once!

Corkindale lists four things business leaders can do to correct the negative perception of business built during the past decade (Enron’s collapse, dotcom bust, Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, irresponsibility of the banking sector, global recession, declining wages—unless you’re an executive, etc.). Her four recommendations are:

  1. Examine your organization systematically. “What is really going on?” she writes. “What needs to be improved?” In other words, conduct a Baldrige assessment to answer these questions and systematically improve your organization.
  2. Build a new dialogue for business. Leaders must make ethical behavior, accountability, sustainability, longer-term focus, and community awareness part of the business agenda. Once again, a Baldrige assessment will help you understand how to make these issues part of your agenda and how well you do it.
  3. Engage people to make the best possible contribution to the business and wider society. “This means sharing power, information, responsibility, and, of course, rewards,” writes Corkindale. Workforce engagement, a key element of the Baldrige model, considers how you share power, information, responsibility, and rewards.
  4. Understand what it really takes to be a leader. “Simplicity is the key.” A Baldrige assessment helps…
4Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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The Most and Least Ethical Companies

According to Covalence, a Swiss research firm, Monsanto is the least ethical multinational corporation in the world. Covalence used quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate 581 companies over a seven-year period. Criteria included labor standards, waste management, and human rights records.

The top-ranked companies were IBM, Intel, and HSBC. Rounding out the top ten were Marks & Spencer, Unilever, Xerox, General Electric, Cisco Systems, Dell, and Procter & Gamble.

The worst were:

  1. Monsanto Co. This is the same corporation that Forbes named America’s Best Company in December. Apparently, ethics wasn’t part of the equation.
  2. Halliburton Company. Dick Cheney’s legacy lives on in both the business and political worlds.
  3. Chevron Corp.
  4. Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc.
  5. Philip Morris International Inc.
  6. Occidental Petroleum Corporation
  7. Ryanair Holdings plc
  8. Syngenta AG
  9. Grupo Mexico SA de CV
  10. Total SA

The companies on this list may survive in the short term because of their economic success, but sustaining that success is another matter. As Adam Werbach, former Sierra Club president, wrote, true sustainability has four equal parts: economic, social, environmental, and cultural (click here). It’s hard to imagine any corporation standing for long on one of those legs, no matter how strong it is.

To read more about corporate social responsibility, click on these articles:

…

3Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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What’s the Real Value of a College Education?

The Baldrige Criteria are all about asking the right questions to help you understand and improve how your organization operates. If your organization is a college or university, here are four fundamental questions recently posed by Fast Company:

  • What do you really learn in college?
  • Is what you learned in college really what’s producing the value?
  • Or is it simply the mere fact of having a college degree?
  • Or maybe there’s something more subtle going on—that is, people who go to college tend to be more motivated or hard-working and would have ended up succeeding whatever they did?

“Infographic of the Day: Is College Really Worth It?” by Cliff Kuang suggests answers to the these questions in an intriguing graphic. The key points are:

  • Two million high school graduates enroll in college each year. One in three drops out after the first year, which wastes $9 billion.
  • One out of five students can’t balance a checkbook.
  • One out of two students can’t correctly analyze prose like news editorials. (How can a democracy function if our supposedly smartest young people cannot think critically?)
  • The average college freshman spends over ten hours a week partying and eight hours a week studying—and more than 63 hours engaged with media and technology (games, cell phones, TV, social networks)
  • 57% of students need six years or more to get their degree

Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business…

2Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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This Year’s Best Employer

According to Fortune magazine, SAS is the best company to work for. Here’s why:

  • A 300-acre campus near Raleigh, North Carolina for 4,200 employees
  • Average tenure for employees of ten years with annual turnover at 2%
  • Typical work week is 35 hours with many employees setting their own schedules
  • No sick day policy: If an employee is sick, he or she decides whether to stay home (the average taken annually is two days)
  • A healthcare center with a staff of 56 including four physicians—and services are free to employees (last year 90% of employees and their families made 40,000 visits)
  • An on-site 66,000-square-foot recreation and fitness center with gym, weight room, billiards hall, sauna, hair salon, manicurist, Olympic-size pool, and massage
  • On-site workday sports leagues
  • Two subsidized daycare centers for 600 children
  • Dry cleaning, car detailing, a book exchange, a meditation garden, an in-season tax-prep vendor, and an orthotics store
  • Three subsidized cafeterias (and they provide takeout for family dinners)
  • Off-campus SAS family nights
  • Two paid artists-in-residence
  • Free M&Ms—22.5 tons a year or 11 pounds per employee

CEO Jim Goodnight explains the SAS approach this way: “My chief assets drive out the gate every day. My job is to make sure they come back.” (“SAS: A new no. 1 best employer,” David A. Kaplan, January 22, 2010)

SAS is the world’s largest privately-held software business with revenues of $2.3 billion. It has been on Fortune’s list of…

1Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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