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Quality Award Programs

Whack-a-Mole Leadership

Your organization may be better than it is, but it will never realize its potential until its leaders stop tinkering with the system. Brian Joiner, a leading management consultant, advises, “Don’t just do something, stand there!” Reacting to a problem without appreciating the context of that problem—the management system that created it—produces temporary relief at best and new problems at worst. Joiner dubs this the “whack-a-mole” approach after the arcade game where you club plastic moles as they pop out of their holes. Whack one and another appears. Whack that one and two pop up, then three. Like the leaders of mediocre companies, you end up spending all of your time reacting to a never-ending mole problem.

If leaders don’t understand how a management system works, they must learn. Before they invest in a program they believe can solve their problems, they must understand the system in which it will be implemented. The system tolerates inept leaders who leave it alone, who pretend to steer along the rutted path. It rewards thoughtful leaders who take the time to discover how it works, to identify the forces and levers and weaknesses, and to direct all efforts toward a single, shared goal. Only then can an organization move from good to great.

The best description of a management system and how it works is found in the Criteria for the Baldrige Award. It may be the most misunderstand concept in the U.S. business community.

You can’t afford to dismiss Baldrige as “just another program.” It’s…

15Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

83 Vie for 2010 Baldrige Award

The Baldrige program reported yesterday that 83 organizations have applied for the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The breakdown of applicant categories is 54 in health care, 10 in education, 7 in nonprofit/government, 7 small businesses, 3 manufacturers, and 2 service companies.

MBNQA Applicants

As the graph shows, last year the health care category accounted for 60% of all applicants. This year it represents 65%. While health care is embracing the Baldrige model, businesses are snubbing it: Only 14.5% of the applicants came from the three business categories, down from 15.7% last year. The Baldrige program came into existence to make American businesses more competitive. While it got business leaders’ attention during its first decade, it has fallen off their radars over the last ten years. It’s hard to imagine the Baldrige program could have survived if it had not added the health care category.

So what will it take to get business leaders to consider the Baldrige model? Or is the program’s inability to market its product too complete to overcome?

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

2Jun2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued

A Baldrige Leader

[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…

27May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

Heartland Health’s Grand Unifying System

As a student of the Baldrige model, I am always attracted to a diagram, a “grand unifying system,” that shows how an organization aligns and integrates everything it does with its vision and mission. The latest example of such a diagram is Heartland Health’s Organizational Architecture (HH OA), which is shown below.

Heartland Health received the Baldrige Award in 2009. You can read its entire award application summary here. It is based in St. Joseph, Missouri, and employs more than 3,200 caregivers. Heartland Health is ranked in the top 15% of hospitals nationally for patient safety and is a leader in patient satisfaction. Using Six Sigma methods, it has saved more than $25 million as a result of process improvements.

The HH OA shows how many of the key elements in the Baldrige model work together to help Heartland Health achieve its vision and mission. Information from the Voice of the Customer (Category 3 in the Baldrige Criteria) feeds the strategic planning process (Category 2), as do strategic business assessments based on performance results (Category 7) and senior leadership reviews (“Manage and Improve,” Category 1). The strategic plan is deployed through the management model, which is aligned with the first six categories of the Baldrige model. The Process Model identifies Heartland Health’s key work processes (Category 6), each of which has a Process Scorecard for each service and product line and Performance Scorecard that feed the organization’s Balanced Scorecard. All scorecards and the data they capture are managed by the performance measurement…

10May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

“America Needs Baldrige”

So says Larry Potterfield, CEO of MidwayUSA, one of the 2009 Baldrige Award recipients telling their stories at the twenty-second Quest for Excellence this week. You can get the 30,000-foot perspective of QEXXII by checking out the blogs being posted at Blogrige, the “official” Baldrige blog (click here).

The Blogrige folks are really selling the conference, posting five times in its first day. Here are the highlights among the highlights:

  • “Process and passion build a champion,” according to Mark Laney, CEO and president of Heartland Health.
  • “Great leadership trumps process,” said Potterfield.
  • There are no education recipients presenting this year, but schools, like America, need Baldrige.
  • Set a grand vision for your organization. MidwayUSA wants to be the best-run business in America. Not much grander than that.
  • “Baldrige is like all the systems of the body that need to work together to create a healthy person,” said Dr. Kathleen Goonan.

More than 700 people are attending the conference. If you’re sorry you missed it, don’t be: You can check out the presentations and materials virtually (click here for more information).

To read more about the Baldrige Award, click on the following articles. (They may not be “official,” but they’re still pretty darn informative.)

13Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

Baldrige Program Site Redesigned

The Baldrige National Quality Program has redesigned its Web site to make it more user friendly. You can check the site out by clicking here.

The site does a much better job of organizing information to meet the needs of its customers. One of the best improvements is the grouping of information by sector. For example, if you click on “Education,” you find a brief summary of the relevance of the Baldrige model to education organizations and a list of related resources including results with Baldrige in education, a list of the Baldrige Award recipients in education, the education Criteria, and articles on the subject.

The site has a section that asks, “Where Are You on Your Baldrige Journey?” You can find specific information about your position on that journey, whether you are new to Baldrige, producing a self-assessment, or applying for the Award.

You will want to check out “Blogrige, the official Baldrige blog”—not to be confused with this site, which is the unofficial Baldrige blog. While you will find a whole lot more information on this unofficial site about all elements of the Baldrige model, Blogrige provides an insider perspective on the Baldrige program that can be instructive.

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

8Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

Summaries of 2009 Baldrige Award Winners Now Available

The application summaries for the 2009 Baldrige Award recipients are now available on the Baldrige program’s Web site. Just click on the organization to read its application summary (pdf):

The application summaries are sanitized versions of the application submitted by the organization with any proprietary information removed. (In the case of Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies, everything except the Profile has been removed so there’s not much there to review.)

You don’t have to read the entire applications to get value from them. If you’re interested in a particular part of the management system, say, strategic planning, you can page down to Category 2 and, in most cases, find a diagram of the organization’s strategic planning process. If you’re curious how an organization performed in a particular area, say, customer satisfaction, you can jump to Item 7.2 in Category 7 and check out trend charts showing results and, in most cases, benchmark comparisons.

If you want to dig into a process, I suggest reading the questions that the explanation is responding to. You can find the Criteria online here.

To read more about how to use the Baldrige Criteria to improve, click on these articles:

5Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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