Criteria
Question Your System: Operating Environment
The Baldrige Criteria pose questions that, when answered, can help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your management system.
P.1a in the Organizational Profile asks fundamental questions about your operating environment. A few are easy to answer, such as what products and/or services you offer and how you deliver them. Others require more thought:
- What are the key characteristics of your organizational culture? You may not have thought much about this. For most organizations, culture is what happens when you’ve been around for awhile. Key characteristics others frequently mention include a focus on customers/patients/students, empowered employees with few levels of management, extensive use of teams, promoting innovation throughout the organization, valuing employee safety, and pursuing world-class quality and cycle time.
- What are your core competencies? How do they relate to your mission? Core competencies are your organization’s areas of greatest expertise that help you fulfill your mission and differentiate you from your competitors. If your core competencies don’t align with your mission, you’ve got a problem.
- What are the key factors that motivate your employees to engage in accomplishing your mission? Later, the Criteria ask how you determine these factors, so don’t just pull them out…
Being Good at the Right Things
The questions in the Organizational Profile of the Baldrige Criteria ask you to describe your organization’s characteristics and competitive environment. This includes the key requirements of three groups: employees, customers, and your supply chain. It also asks about key strategic challenges and advantages that relate to creating a sustainable organization.
The strategic planning category picks up this thread by asking how you determine your core competencies and strategic challenges and advantages. It also asks how your strategy development process identifies potential blind spots and your ability to execute the plan.
Some organizations use simple priority quadrant diagrams to help identify blind spots and assess capabilities. Here’s an example that matches organizational capabilities to customer requirements.
The diagram may be simple but the data, information, and analysis behind it is not. First, you need a profound knowledge of who your customers are and what they require. You can read articles about this here and here. If you assume you know what these requirements are, the decisions you base on your assumptions can lead you in the wrong direction.
Second, you need a profound knowledge of what your organization’s capabilities are. Again, if you assume you know…
18Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued3 Systematic Innovation Processes
“Managing for innovation” is a Baldrige core value. “Systematic processes for innovation should reach across your entire organization,” according to the Baldrige Criteria booklets.
So what is a systematic process for innovation? At the Clinton Global Initiative yesterday, Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, introduced three such processes that can be applied to social issues but are also relevant for any organization:
- User-Driven Innovation. Use measurable results to identify what is working well in a team, group, or department. Define the approach and teach others how to use it. Such internal benchmarking has been a strength of many Baldrige Award recipients.
- Crowd Sourcing. Your internal experts are linked virtually by your organization’s intranet. Post a challenge for any individual or self-selected team to solve. Set a deadline. Establish rewards and recognition for contributors and for the best solution.
- Collaborative Competition. Same idea except that individuals and teams work together to solve a problem by posting their ideas and building off the ideas of others. “That gives you two things,” said Rodin, “a line of sight to see where the white spaces may be and a collaboration in the competition because the sooner you re-post…
25 “Moonshots for Management”
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:
- 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.
- Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. Criteria Item…
Know Your Value Proposition
The Baldrige Criteria ask: “What are the principal factors that determine your success relative to your competencies?” In marketing terms, this is your value proposition, the reason a customer should buy your product or use your service instead of a competitor’s.
According to Anthony Tjan (“Value Propositions that Work,” Harvard Business Publishing, September 14, 2009), there are only four categories of value propositions that work:
- Best quality
- Best bang for the buck
- Luxury and aspiration
- Must-have
If you think of a market or industry leader, you can probably figure out the category of its value proposition. Whole Foods = best quality. Wal-Mart = best bang for the buck. Ritz-Carlton = luxury and aspiration. Apple iPhone = must-have.
An organization that knows its value proposition has a competitive advantage because it must understand and build upon its core competencies to produce its signature value, align people and processes to provide that value, and communicate that value to customers, employees, and the public to establish and sustain its leadership.
And then it must deliver on its value proposition. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Baldrige Award recipients is that they know who they are. They are clear about their vision and…
14Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Are Your Organization’s Core Competencies?
It’s one of the first questions in the Baldrige Criteria. Few organizations have a good answer.
The Baldrige Criteria define core competencies as “your organization’s areas of greatest expertise…strategically important capabilities…central to your mission or provide an advantage,” that are frequently “challenging for competitors to imitate and provide a sustainable competitive advantage.”
What do you do better than your competitors that gives you an edge in your market?
Here’s an example from Richland College (RLC), the first and only community college to receive the Baldrige Award. Located in Dallas, Texas, RLC serves a multicultural student body of 14,500 students seeking college credits and another 6,000 continuing education students.
RLC has identified four core competencies:
- Seamless transitions for lifelong learning
- Leader-full, values-inspired agility and innovation
- Development and engagement of faculty and staff
- Sustainable community building – the triple bottom line
You will see evidence of processes RLC uses to take advantage of these core competencies in its award application summary and results that affirm that these are, indeed, RLC’s areas of expertise. Case in point: All employees have career-development plans that, for those employees encouraged to pursue senior leadership positions, include training, internships, and filling in for senior leaders when they are out.…
2Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedInnovation and Quality
What is the relationship between innovation and quality?
In June 2009, leaders from business, industry, non-governmental organizations, ASQ, and the Baldrige program met to discuss how “quality and performance improvement can achieve the greatest effect and foster positive change.” At the end of the day, the group identified four priority areas of focus for the future of quality and organizational performance excellence:
- Ensure that quality systems and performance excellence are relevant and support long-term sustainability
- Connect quality with innovation
- Increase public awareness by branding quality and performance excellence
- Use information and engagement technology and tools to change mindsets and behavior
I think connecting quality with innovation is the easiest of the four because the connection already exists. In a culture of innovation, people are constantly seeking ways to improve processes and performance. It’s not just about building the next iPod or creating the next Twitter. In fact, it’s almost not about that at all. I read an interview done by Ubiquity with Peter Denning, a teacher at the Naval Postgraduate School, in which he does a great job of redefining innovation. “What I hear most commonly from people is the notion that innovation means a new or novel…
26Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
