Archive for admin
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” and published in prestigious journals. Recent examples include the boundaryless organization, job sculpting, reengineering, and, yes, Six Sigma. Most of these new management theories turn out to be nothing more…
8Feb2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued5 Baldrige Application Mistakes
Over the past 20 years, I have had the opportunity to work with or review more than 250 Baldrige and state award applications, Shingo Prize applications, and feedback reports. The goal of an application is to receive the most useful feedback report possible while earning all the points your organization is entitled to. In my experience, most beginning organizations, especially those writing an application entirely on their own, make five basic mistakes that keep them from reaching this goal:
- Not using figures, including tables and graphics, effectively in the application
- Not providing key information
- Not providing key results
- Ignoring the scoring guidelines
- Not having someone knowledgeable about the Criteria and the examination process review the application before submission
There are two types of questions in the Criteria: “how” questions asking for the description of a process and “what” questions asking for information. A root cause of mistake #2 often results from not answering a “what” question. One applicant’s feedback report read, “The applicant did not describe the most important goals for its strategic objectives.” The Criteria ask what these goals are.
It is critical to provide the information requested in a space-saving format, which is why bulleted lists and tables are commonly used, thus avoiding mistake #1. Space is limited in the Organizational Profile and Categories 1-7. The use of a single table that covers the responses to multiple questions is very efficient.
Another best practice is the addition of a column to a table that identifies related Category 7 results. You can find an example of this…
19Jan2010 | admin | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Best Cross-Disciplinary Teams
You’ve got a complex problem to solve or process to improve and you need a cross-disciplinary, cross-functional team to do it. How do you decide who should be on that team?
Bill Buxton, Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research, suggests that you look for I-shaped people. In a July 13, 2009, article in BusinessWeek, Buxton argues for the value of the I-shaped person: “They have their feet firmly planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head in the clouds when they need to. Furthermore, they simultaneously span all of the space in between.”
Such people excel at abstract thinking and at using physical material and tools. They’re grounded in reality but able to rise above the specifics of a problem to think of it in a more abstract and general way.
Buxton offers guidelines for building a cross-disciplinary team:
- Don’t put someone else like you on the team. You need people who fill the gaps of your skill set.
- Test for and choose team members with both a breadth of literacy and deep competence. Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, calls these “T-shaped people”: They have “basic literacy in a relatively broad domain of relevant knowledge” (the horizontal bar of the T) “along with real depth or competence in a much narrower domain” (the vertical line of the T).
- Identify the core competencies you need for the team and then write the “go-to” team member for each competency. Address any gaps.
- Test and select for I-shapedness.
- Choose people who don’t need predictability…
