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How Long Does It Take to Win?

Most organizations are attracted to Baldrige because they want to improve their performance, but at some point, almost all of them ask a question that has been on their minds:

How long does it take to win the Baldrige Award?

The Caterpillar Financial Services Corporation started using Baldrige in 1993 through the Tennessee Quality Award program. It was awarded the Tennessee Quality Excellence Award in 1999 and received the Baldrige Award in 2003. According to its Web site, it planned to apply for the Baldrige Award again this year as a worldwide organization.

You could say it took Cat Financial ten years to win the Baldrige Award. I know other organizations–granted, not many–who have done it in two.

So how long does it take to win the Baldrige Award? It depends.

It depends on your starting point. If you’re a 250-point organization (which is pretty common for first-time Baldrige assessments), it’s probably at least five years. If you’re a 500-point company, maybe a couple years if everything goes right.

It depends on senior executive commitment. If your CEO will move mountains to close the gaps in your management system, it will take less time than if senior leaders stand on the sidelines and delegate the improvement process.

It depends on how serious the gaps are. If you don’t have…

Steve George | March 10th, 2010 | 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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New Report on Process Management

How Baldrige Award Winners Design, Manage, and Improve Their Processes

Get a copy of this free report by entering your name and email address in the orange box on the right. You will read how seven Baldrige Award winners excel at process management, including the common elements you can use to create an effective approach:

  • Process design or redesign includes clearly identifying customer requirements, piloting or testing to make sure the process works as planned, training or retraining for those involved in the process, and identifying key process performance measures.
  • Process measurement is vital to process management and improvement.
  • A person or group is responsible for every key process.
  • Everyone needs to be involved in process improvement.
  • Process improvement must be managed.
  • Best-practice process improvements are identified and shared.

Here’s what you’re signing up for when you submit your name and email address. First, you will receive the free report, and then you will get an email with the second free report on performance management. You will receive three emails over the next three weeks that talk about information on Baldrige.com that you may not be aware of—all of which is free. Finally, you will receive email occasionally to alert you to special features on Baldrige.com, such as the next free report. Everything is free. I won’t bug…

10Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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10 Healthcare Innovations

The Harvard Business Review’s Health Care Innovations Insight Center has listed ten innovations it thinks could eventually improve healthcare (“Health Care of the Future,” Gardiner Morse, March 8, 2010).

Checklists. A checklist at Johns Hopkins Hospital required doctors to confirm, among other things, that they had washed their hands before inserting a central line. The 10-day line-infection rate went from 11% to zero. But getting people to use checklists can be a struggle.

Behavioral Economics. Nudge patients to comply with doctors’ orders, and nudge doctors to improve care.

Patient Portals. Patients could log onto their own secure portal to access and share their medical records, check lab results, renew prescriptions, deal with insurers, and communicate with doctors and nurses.

Payment Innovations. “Any hope of affordable, quality care lies partly in payment reform.”

Evidence-Based Decision Making. Electronic medical records should help doctors make better decisions based on the best evidence.

Accountable Care Organizations. The health reform bill includes plans for a pilot ACO whose job is to keep people healthy and out of the hospital and reward doctors and hospitals when they do.

Virtual Visits. Televisiting, a la Ellen Page talking to her doctor, who is in Denmark, in the Cisco ad.

Regenerative Medicine. “Stem cells…can potentially cure an array of devastating, once intractable conditions.”

Surgical Robots. The jury is still…

9Mar2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued
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The Best Way to Measure Company Performance

OK, I stole the title. John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison posted on this very topic on the Harvard Business Review today. And then they spent the entire time dissing return on equity and touting return on assets in its place.

Hello? I understand the whole “business-exists-to-make-a-profit-and-nothing-else-really-matters” position, but are ROA or ROE really the best ways to measure company performance? I thought the balanced scorecard came along because our obsession with financial performance wasn’t working. Apparently, a lot of folks can’t stop obsessing.

Case in point: HuffPost Business. If you visited its home page today you would find articles on Goldman Sachs, predatory lending, Hank Paulson, the Treasury Department, AIG’s bonus cutbacks, robber barons, financial crisis, financial innovation, bank bailouts, Federal Reserve, credit card blacklists, financial reform, economic oracles, Citigroup, China, more on the Federal Reserve, home sales, jobs bill, dollar vs. euro, Greece bailout, still more Federal Reserve, etc. About the only articles on the home page that weren’t about money were about health care and fast cars.

It shouldn’t be HuffPost Business; it should be HuffPost Finance. And they’re far from alone. Pick any random site that purports to tell you what’s happening in the business world and you’ll find that 90% of their articles revolve around…

5Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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The Financial Impact of Integrating Baldrige

Business leaders have long sought proof that embracing the Baldrige model, implementing Total Quality Management, or applying for Baldrige Award or state quality awards pays. Does it make our company more profitable? Does it return value to our shareholders? Is it worth the effort and changes involved?

Quality Award Study Results

The answer to all three questions is, “Yes.”

Dr. Vinod Singhal of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Dr. Kevin Hendricks of the College of William and Mary did a five-year study of more than 600 quality award winners. They compared the financial performance of these winners with a control sample of companies similar in size and operating in the same industries. Singhal and Hendricks tracked both groups for ten years: six years before the award winners won their award and four years after.

Their study revealed that, over a five-year period starting one year before the winners won their first award, the award winners averaged significantly larger increases in several key measures of financial performance:

  • 44% higher stock price return
  • 48% higher growth in operating income
  • 37% higher growth in sales

When Singhal and Hendricks separated the independent award winners (Baldrige and state quality award winners) from those companies winning supplier awards, the results were even more dramatic:

  • 61% increase in stock returns over the control group
  • 73% increase in operating…
4Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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Best-in-Class Workforce Planning

In January, the Aberdeen Group published a report on Strategic Workforce Planning. Their conclusions sound like responses to Baldrige Criteria questions.

The group surveyed 240 organizations and differentiated best-in-class (BIC) performers from those in the middle and the laggards. They found that:

  • The BIC performers saw a 13% decrease in key talent turnover in the past 12 months compared to a 13% increase for the laggards.
  • The BIC performers have at least one “ready and willing” successor for 53% of their key positions compared to just 15% for the laggards.
  • The BIC performers have workforce plans in place in 90% of their divisions compared to 13% for the laggards.

The group concluded that BIC performers share common characteristics:

  • Involvement of senior leaders with workforce planning initiatives
  • Ability to define and screen against competencies required for future business success
  • Tools to integrate employee data with financial, customer, and other data to create a comprehensive view of the workforce.

If you integrate the Baldrige model, you will improve your performance in each of these areas by improving your performance on these related Baldrige Criteria questions:

  • How do senior leaders participate in organizational learning, succession planning, and in the development of future organizational leaders?
  • How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs, including skills, competencies, and staffing levels?
  • How do you relate your…
3Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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Shrink the Change

I’m guilty of being negative. When I evaluate a company’s Baldrige assessment, I dutifully note its strengths but I really zero in on its opportunities for improvement. And that’s a mistake.

In their thought-provoking book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Broadway Business, 2010), brothers Chip and Dan Heath explain why you need to learn how to recognize and understand your strengths, the best practices, the small victories—the bright spots:

“To pursue bright spots is to ask the question ‘What’s working, and how can we do more of it?’ Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused, ‘What’s broken, and how do we fix it?’”

I highly recommend Switch for its eclectic mix of research from a wide variety of fields that challenges the accepted wisdom about change. Change is hard? It doesn’t have to be that hard. We need a burning platform? Not really. Use SMART goals to change? Won’t work.

Instead, how about: Shrink the change. “Make the change small enough that they can’t help but score a victory,” write the Heaths. Arrange for early successes and you build momentum for the bigger changes ahead.

Or: Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending…

2Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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