[Note: E. David Spong is the only person to lead two different organizations in two different sectors to winning the Baldrige Award. Next week he takes over as president of the American Society for Quality. This is the story of how he helped two Boeing organizations become world class.]

When E. David Spong joined Boeing Airlift and Tanker Programs’ executive team in 1991, he stepped onto a burning platform. “We had a deep, deep crisis,” said Spong. “We had a morale problem, a leadership problem, and a process problem, and we knew that, if we didn’t turn the program around, we’d be out of work.”

Ninety percent of A&T’s business came from U.S. Air Force orders for the C-17 airlifter, a plane capable of carrying a 170,000-pound load. Boeing A&T had an order for 40 of the planes with the potential to build 120, but technical problems, cost overruns, and late deliveries led the Defense Department to threaten cancellation of the additional planes and their $14.2 billion price tag. A&T’s general manager, John McDonnell, decided to use the Baldrige criteria for an internal assessment as a way to identify and prioritize major problems.

Their first effort earned 200 points. McDonnell’s executive team, including Spong, didn’t know much about the assessment, nor did they do much with it. Initiatives that responded to the assessment floundered until McDonnell tied his executives’ incentive compensation to progress on the initiatives.

That got their attention. By 1995 A&T had an on-time delivery record of 100 percent. Productivity increased 60 percent in four years while performance on key quality measures improved 50 percent.

Spong became the general manager in October 1997 when McDonnell retired. The next year Boeing A&T won the Baldrige Award. Two years later, Spong was named president of Boeing Aerospace Support, which provides maintenance and repairs for Boeing aircraft and training for aircrews and maintenance staff.

“Aerospace Support was in a very different position than A&T,” Spong said. “They thought they were good. All I talked about were C-17 and Baldrige and people looked at me like, ‘Here we go again.’”

Spong took every good idea invented at A&T and improved on it at Aerospace Support. He conducted an internal Baldrige assessment that identified key initiatives. He involved his leadership team in the process by making them executive champions of those initiatives, in most cases in areas outside their normal realms of responsibility. He motivated them to act on the initiatives by demanding progress reports at every staff meeting. He turned up the heat by asking each site to apply for its state quality award, and he tracked improvements in their scores.

“When you plot the scores over time, you see incredible improvements,” said Spong. “I showed a clear correlation between progress on Baldrige scores and our business, people, quality, and government assessment results.”

Seven sites won their state awards, another won the Australian Quality Award, and Aerospace Support as a whole won the 2003 Baldrige Award. More importantly, the business unit’s annual revenue more than doubled from 1999 to 2003 in a flat market.

Whether a company suffers in survival mode or believes it is “good enough,” its leaders must still find ways to overcome people’s natural resistance to systemic change. David Spong faced both situations. In one case, linking performance to incentive compensation got executives on board. In the other, assigning executive champions and expecting them to report their progress produced results.

You can read an interview with Spong here.

To read more about Baldrige Award winners, click on these articles:

• How the Baldrige Award Works
• Baldrige Gets Results
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• Heartland Health’s Grand Unifying System
• Summaries of 2009 Baldrige Award Winners Now Available

(5 votes, average: 4.40 out of 5)

 Loading ...