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Baldrige

Baldrige and the Illusion of Control

An email newsletter today from Craig Anderson at Global Performance Systems describes the Baldrige model as open source management technology since a number of people have evaluated and helped improve it over the last 22 years.

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…
12May2010 | 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

The Best Baldrige Scores

The Baldrige program released more data on the 1,100 or so applicants for the Baldrige Award from 1990 through 2006. The best score over that 17-year period was 811 out of a possible 1,000 points by a company in 1990. The data do not identify the applicants. By my count, there have been just ten organizations that have received more than 700 points, and only one since 1993.

From what I can tell, the best scores for the Items in process categories 1 to 6 from 2003 to 2006, when the point values of each Item did not change, were:

1.1: 55 of 70   |   1.2: 38 of 50

2.1: 32 of 40   |   2.2: 33 of 45

3.1: 32 of 40   |   3.2: 36 of 45

4.1: 36 of 45   |   4.2: 35 of 45

5.1: 26 of 35   |   5.2: 18 of 25   |   5.3: 19 of 25

6.1: 38 of 50   |   6.2: 31 of 35

The data indicate that the best score an organization can achieve on a process Item is around 75-80% of the possible points, and the same is true for categories. The best scores by process category from 2003 to 2006 were:

1: 91 of 120  |  2: 64 of 85  |  3: 63 of 85

4: 70 of 90  |  5: 63 of 85  |  6: 66 of 85

The best scores for results Items in 2005 and 2006, when the point values for each item were the same, were:

7.1: 75 of 100   |   7.2: 51 of 70   |   7.3: 55 of 70

7.4: 49…

29Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

A City of Excellence

People who embrace Baldrige in their organizations often become zealots for the Baldrige model. Larry Potterfield, CEO of MidwayUSA, which received the Baldrige Award in 2009, is a zealot.

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…

18Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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