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 been around long enough (23 years) that you’ve probably heard of it. You may have noticed the names of some Award winners. At one time someone may have talked about looking into it. Now you’ve got a second chance. Unless your organization is performing at world-class levels, you can’t afford to ignore the stunning results the Baldrige process can produce.

You also can’t get stuck on the “Award” part; the Criteria are what are important here. They embody the best thinking to come out of this country’s business community. To read the Criteria is to discover all of the factors that comprise your organization’s management system. To answer the questions the Criteria pose is to expose the systemic weaknesses that keep you from world-class performance.

Think of your organization as an athlete with the potential to be an Olympic champion. Baldrige is a proven training regimen designed by this country’s leading experts on organizational fitness. It begins with the goals and results you wish to achieve. It then scrutinizes every element within your control and identifies strengths to build upon and weaknesses to tackle. The resulting training regimen, designed by you to reflect your unique talents, resources, and goals, addresses all areas critical to world-class performance. In our analogy, it wouldn’t prescribe a weightlifting program while ignoring nutrition. It aligns all activities with your goals. Day in and day out, you work on those areas critical to your success, inspired by a process with a 16-year history of turning out world-class performers.

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

• 10 Steps to World Class
• Baldrige 101
• Baldrige Gets Results
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• 80 Critical Questions

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

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:

• What Is Baldrige?
• How the Baldrige Award Works
• Baldrige 101
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• Baldrige Gets Results
• A Baldrige Leader
• Summaries of 2009 Baldrige Award Winning Applications

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