Last year the Management Lab, with support from McKinsey & Company, assembled 35 management experts to discuss what management practices imperiled the long-term success of large organizations and what fundamental changes are needed in management principles, processes, and practices.

Gary Hamel, author of two leading books on business strategy, described three broadly-shared beliefs among the participants in the Harvard Business Review:

• “Management” is one of our most important social technologies.
• The management model of the last 100 years is out of date.
• We must reinvent management to make large organizations more adaptable, innovative, and inspiring places to work.

The Baldrige model can help any organization of any size reinvent its management system by identifying, prioritizing, and acting on the major gaps in that system. I believe Baldrige provides a systems perspective and sound guidance on achieving the 25 “moonshots for management” that the experts proposed:

1. Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. The first question in the Baldrige Criteria is: “How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values?” The Criteria then ask how senior leaders deploy them and how their personal actions support them.
2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. Criteria Item 1.2 asks how the organization fulfills its societal responsibilities and supports its key communities.
3. Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations. The Baldrige model values efficiency and profitability, but it also values quality products and services, satisfied customers and employees, ethical behavior, and stakeholder trust.
4. Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy. The Baldrige Criteria ask how “senior leaders communicate with and engage the entire workforce” and how they “encourage frank, two-way communication.”
5. Reduce fear and increase trust. Workforce engagement, which cannot thrive in a fearful environment, is the first Item in Category 5 of the Criteria.
6. Reinvent the means of control. Control systems such as those of two-time Baldrige Award recipient The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company prepare each employee to make the best decisions.
7. Redefine the work of leadership. The Baldrige Criteria define the work of senior leaders throughout the first Category.
8. Expand and exploit diversity. The Criteria ask: “How do you ensure that your organizational culture benefits from the diverse ideas, cultures, and thinking of your workforce?”
9. Reinvent strategy-making as an emergent process. The strategic planning Category defines a robust process for developing strategies.
10. De-structure and disaggregate the organization. Agility, a core value of the Baldrige model, is characterized by the capacity for rapid change and flexibility, which help large organizations become more adaptable and innovative.
11. Dramatically reduce the pull of the past. Integrating the Baldrige model is a transformative journey aimed at achieving results rather than sustaining the status quo.
12. Share the work of setting direction. The second part of the strategic planning Category involves deploying the strategic plan, which involves everyone in goal setting to support the organization’s goals and action plans.
13. Develop holistic performance measures. The Baldrige model promotes a balanced scorecard approach both in Category 4 and in the scope of the results it requires.
14. Stretch executive time frames and perspectives. Another Baldrige core value is a focus on the future to create a sustainable organization.
15. Create a democracy of information. The Criteria ask how “you make needed data and information available and accessible.”
16. Empower the renegades and disarm the reactionaries. Empowering employees is the result of “an organizational culture that is characterized by open communication, high-performance work, and an engaged workforce,” which is a focus of the Baldrige Criteria.
17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy. See The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company.
18. Create internal markets for ideas, talent, and resources. The Baldrige Criteria go a step farther, using the strategic planning process to allocate resources that will enable the organization to achieve its action plans.
19. Depoliticize decision-making. The Criteria promote open, two-way communication, and Award recipients have used innovative approaches to capture the collective wisdom of their entire organizations.
20. Better optimize trade-offs. The strategic planning Category asks multiple questions about how you identify, discuss, and select your strategic objectives and action plans.
21. Further unleash human imagination. The Criteria ask how “you manage and organize your workforce to accomplish the work of your organization.”
22. Enable communities of passion. Again, employee engagement is supported in several Baldrige Categories.
23. Retool management for an open world. The Criteria ask about “the principal factors that determine your success relative to your competitors” and about opportunities for innovation and collaboration.
24. Humanize the language and practice of business. “Valuing workforce members and partners” is a Baldrige core value.
25. Retrain managerial minds. The Criteria ask several questions about leadership development.

It’s clear that any organization wishing to tackle these “moonshots for management” would do well to conduct a Baldrige assessment and integrate the Baldrige model.

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