We’ve been answering that question now for one year with nearly 370 articles on all aspects of a world-class management system. Our guide for what to address is the Baldrige model defined by the Baldrige Criteria and used to determine Baldrige Award winners. No other management model in the world has been as thoroughly tested, refined, and deployed.

The goal of any management system is to produce the results you want your organization to achieve. Ideally, those results align with your organization’s mission and vision. In world-class organizations, results are multi-dimensional and not just profits for a business or test results for a school. The Baldrige Criteria identify six areas where excellent results are necessary for long-term success.

The rest of the Baldrige Criteria address the development and deployment of the systematic processes needed to achieve world-class results. The Baldrige model is a process model: It asks how you do what you do more than 130 times.

Process has four dimensions:

• The approach you use to get something done
• Consistent deployment of the approach to all relevant areas of the organization
• Refining the approach through cycles of learning
• The integration of your approach with the rest of your management system

Questions about your processes are organized in six Categories: leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, measurement, workforce focus, and process management. Everything you do to run your organization fits into one or more of these Categories.

The articles on Baldrige.com explore the Categories, as you can see by clicking on one of the Categories on the menu bar at the top of the page. We also provide information about the Baldrige assessment process and Award and about specific sectors such as business, healthcare, education, and government.

In our experience, the Baldrige model is relevant for any type and size of organization. That’s the beauty of the Baldrige model: It captures the key elements that must be addressed for any organization to achieve its potential. You can see what those elements are by reading the Baldrige Criteria, and you can find out how well your organization performs on those elements by conducting a Baldrige assessment.

A Baldrige assessment can be a transformative experience. Organizations that want to improve will find opportunities for improvement that will change how they operate, and because the Baldrige model has been tested and proven effective for more than 20 years, leaders can feel confident that the changes they choose will make their organizations better.

To learn more about Baldrige, check out the articles listed in blue in the middle column on this page. To learn more about what each Category addresses, click on the Category at the top of this page and you all of the articles about that Category will be listed.

Don’t believe me? Take the test. Assess your management system using the Baldrige criteria. Submit your assessment for review by trained evaluators. While you’re waiting to find out how you did, start working on those weaknesses revealed while you were putting the assessment together. Because there will be weaknesses.

I’ve helped dozens of organizations conduct Baldrige assessments. Some knew they had problems and wanted to find them. Others thought they were pretty good and wanted affirmation. The first group was never disappointed.

Very few leaders have participated in a thorough evaluation of their management systems. Most wouldn’t know where to start. Fortunately, the Baldrige criteria provide both a framework and a process for such an endeavor.

The framework involves asking questions about how your company works. The questions are grouped into seven categories that cover every aspect of your management system, from how you achieve your strategic objectives to how you determine customer requirements to how you manage key processes to a whole lot more. If you’ve never asked these questions, rigorously answered them, and expertly evaluated your answers, you have no idea how good (or bad) your management system is. You’re like the blindfolded man who feels an elephant’s trunk and thinks, “snake,” or holds its leg and imagines a tree. You are blind to how your company really functions. You are clueless about how the system truly works, and the system dictates your capabilities. Remember: You can’t outperform the system in which you are performing.

To find out more about conducting a Baldrige assessment, click on these articles:

• Baldrige 101
• 10 Steps to an Effective Baldrige Assessment
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• How the Baldrige Award Works
• Learn from the Best: Application Summaries

Now an unlikely company has brought in trainers from the Ritz to show their dealers how to create a consistent sales experience and create loyal customers. The company? Cadillac.

According to an article in Bloomberg Businessweek, “Cadillac has copied Ritz’s pocket-sized ‘Credo’ cards, which explain how customers should be treated.” Cadillac service managers now have greater flexibility to “wow” customers. One dealer in the Chicago area gave employees $300 to $500 in “wow” money, which may be an iffy proposition if the employees haven’t been trained in how to dole out that money responsibly. The last I heard, new employees at the Ritz receive more than 250 hours of training in their first year of work, and a good part of that training is in customer service. Without the training, the “wow” money may just become, “Wow, look at all the money we wasted.”

It’s all about the culture and the management system. Companies that try to emulate one chunk of a world-class system without having the culture and the other key elements of the system in place may see short-term improvement, but it won’t last. The system will absorb the change and return to the way things used to be. It will snap back. You cannot change a culture—you cannot improve just customer service or just employee engagement—without changing the system.

Hopefully, Cadillac understands that since it has something else in common with Ritz-Carlton: It also won a Baldrige Award. Unfortunately, that was 20 years ago. My guess is that little remains of the leadership and management system of those glory days.

Click here to read the Bloomberg Businessweek article, “What Cadillac Is Learning from the Ritz,” by Jeff Green and David Welch, June 17, 2010.

To read more about Ritz-Carlton, click on these articles:

• Leaders in Customer Service
• World-Class Employee Orientation
• Ground Zero for Customer Service

For example, the subject, “Application Process,” lists 164 articles. The industry, “Health Care – Hospital” offers 115 articles. A search by the keywords, “Balanced Scorecard,” turned up 34 articles. A brief review of articles suggests that many came from the American Society for Quality and from state award programs. The Alliance for Performance Excellence is the online presence for Baldrige-focused programs including state programs.

To check out the Baldrige Resource Library, click here.

While you are on the APE site, check out the state and local programs in your area by clicking on the “State & Local Programs” tab at the top of the screen. You can find out what programs are available in your area, related Web site addresses, and contact information to find out more. State and local Baldrige-related programs often provide more personal service tailored to your organization’s needs and are a great starting point for your Baldrige journey.

To learn more about Baldrige, explore this Web site or click on these articles:

• New to Baldrige?
• Baldrige Core Values
• The Baldrige Criteria
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• 80 Critical Questions
• 10 Steps to World Class

Craig’s observation is part of an article on the illusion of control. According to the article, “a team of researchers found that investment bankers who were prone to a high illusion of control had significantly worse performance on analysis, risk management, and contribution to desk profits. They also earned significantly less.” The researchers blamed these results on the illusion of control, which may cause insensitivity to feedback, impede learning, and encourage greater risk taking.

The antidote for the illusion of control is a healthy dose of reality, and the best way to get real is to do a Baldrige assessment. An accurate and complete description of how your organization works will show what is in control and what is not—and it’s rarely what senior leaders think it is, especially with a first assessment.

Craig identifies three keys to shattering the illusion of control:

1. Eliminate fear from your organization. This was one of Deming’s major areas of emphasis. Fear destroys the truth by stifling communication and hampering opposing views. What you are left with is the illusion of control.
2. Make the time to understand why. As Craig writes, “Drive-by management fosters an illusion of control.” Make the time to ask why things are happening and to understand the reasons.
3. Conduct an objective self-assessment. You’ll learn what to improve and now to improve it. Instead of making poor decisions because of your illusion of control (as the investment bankers did), a Baldrige assessment will identify the areas that need the work and that are important to your success.

To read more about the Baldrige assessment process, click on these articles:

• 10 Steps to an Effective Baldrige Assessment
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• Leading the Integration of Baldrige
• Learning from the Best Application Summaries
• 10 Tips for Answering Criteria Questions
• The Value of Baldrige Consultants
• 5 Added Values of the Baldrige Process

MidwayUSA is a small, family-owned shooting supply retailer in Columbia, Missouri. Potterfied convinced a number of local business leaders to form the Columbia chapter of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Group with the goal of promoting Columbia as a “city of excellence.”

“This is a really, really smart and well-educated community,” Potterfield is quoted as saying in the Columbia Daily Tribune (“Group pushes for government, business excellence,” T.J. Greaney, March 15, 2010). He adds, “But there’s never been a tool to help us individually and collectively raise the bar.”

Columbia is a city of 100,000 located about halfway between St. Louis and Kansas City. It’s a college town (University of Missouri) in which more than half the residents hold a bachelor’s degree, making it the thirteenth most highly-educated municipality in the U.S., according to Wikipedia.

Smart people gravitate to the Baldrige model, as Columbia is demonstrating. The model is relevant for any organization a community has: businesses, healthcare, government, education, and nonprofits.

And Potterfield and MidwayUSA stand ready to help. Thirty-three of the company’s 243 employees have been trained as Missouri Quality Award examiners. According to Potterfield, he and his employees will donate as much time as needed to help others learn about the program.

I hope it works and that other cities take on the challenge. Who wouldn’t want to live in a city of excellence?

To read more about becoming a Baldrige organization, click on these articles:

• The Universality of the Baldrige Model
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• What to Tell Your Boss about Baldrige
• 10 Steps to World Class
• Learn from the Best Application Summaries

Bain & Co. decided that integrating Baldrige was too obvious, so it spent ten years studying more than 2,000 companies to find the formula for success. Jill Jusko lists the five principles Bain came up with in “A Repeatable Formula for Success” (IndustryWeek, March 16, 2010):

1. Know what the core of your organization is and how you’ve made it work for you. This may include four to seven assets such as brand and talent. In Baldrige terms, it means identifying your core competencies and building on them.

2. Have up to ten non-negotiable principles upon which your organization is built. Baldrige calls these your mission, vision, and values.

3. Prefer distributed leadership, which means fewer layers of management. Baldrige doesn’t prescribe distributed leadership, but it does promote empowerment and agility, which are often associated with fewer layers of management.

4. Keep information coming in from customers through a strong, closed feedback loop system. The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions about how you build a customer culture and how you listen to customers.

5. Keep the number of key operating measures small and be sure everyone at levels understands and believes in them. Again, Baldrige doesn’t tell you to keep the number of key measures small, but it does ask how you select, align, and integrate your key measures for tracking daily operations, reviewing performance, and tracking progress on your strategic plan. The Criteria also ask how you make data and information available and accessible.

To see what I mean about the success of Baldrige organizations being repeatable, check out these results:

• Financial Results
• Customer Results
• Workforce Results
• Quality Results

To read more about the Baldrige formula for success, click on these articles:

• 10 Questions to Ask about Everything You Do
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• Leading the Integration of Baldrige
• 5 Added Values of the Baldrige Process
• Experts Tell You What to Fix
• 10 Steps to World Class