Baldrige
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This is the 600th article to be posted on Baldrige.com, providing “the information you need to build the organization you want” since July 2009. Whether you’re a new visitor to the site—and there have been 9,000 visitors in the past month—or you’ve been here before, this is how Baldrige.com can help you:
- Get the results you want: It will help your organization achieve performance excellence whether you are in healthcare, manufacturing, service, education, nonprofit, or government.
- Learn about all aspects of the Baldrige model. Just click on one of the tabs at the top of this page to learn more about these key areas.
- Find out how to integrate Baldrige. Any type or size of organization can achieve world-class results by integrating the Baldrige model. We explain how to do it.
- Identify your top opportunities for improvement. A Baldrige assessment gives you a detailed snapshot of your entire management system, exposing your opportunities for improvement. We describe how to conduct an assessment and provide consulting support, if needed.
- Close the gaps. Baldrige.com has hundreds of articles about specific areas of concern. For example, you will find more than 75 articles about leadership alone, not to mention the free report on Baldrige Award-Winning Leadership now available (sign up on the right of this page).
- Become a valued expert. An organization is a complicated system with many moving parts. Baldrige.com can help you identify, organize, and improve those parts to reach your personal and organizational goals.
Thanks for making Baldrige.com the #1 source for “the information you need to build the organization you want.”
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3Nov2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedValue of Baldrige Validated — Again
Thomson Reuters released a report this week on a study that demonstrates that “hospitals using the Baldrige process exhibit significantly higher rates of improvement in balanced organizational performance than non-Baldrige hospitals.”
The study confirms what similar studies of business performance have also shown. No matter what their organizations do, leaders need to consider these results and, if their organizations are not integrating Baldrige, ask how they, too, can achieve similar high rates of improvement.
Thomson Reuters uses independent public data to measure hospital performance and identify the national benchmarks for balanced excellence. It publishes the best 3% in an annual list of 100 Top Hospitals. For this study, it measured the association between 38 Baldrige hospitals (Award winners plus site-visit hospitals that gave permission) and 100 Top Hospitals on key indicators of performance and improvement. The analysis showed:
- Substantial agreement between the results of the Baldrige process and the Top 100 Hospitals award: Baldrige hospitals are significantly more likely than their peers to win a 100 Top Hospitals award.
- Baldrige hospitals were significantly more likely than their peers to display faster five-year performance improvement.
- Baldrige hospitals were about 83% more likely than non-Baldrige hospitals to be awarded a 100 Top Hospitals award for excellence.
- Baldrige hospitals outperformed non-Baldrige hospitals on nearly all of the individual measures of performance used in the 100 Top Hospitals composite score including risk-adjusted mortality, risk-adjusted complications index, patient safety index, CMS core measures score, severity-adjusted average length of stay, and adjusted operating profit margin.
You can read the Thomson Reuters report here.
You…
27Oct2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Systems Perspective
How do you make the argument for integrating Baldrige at your organization?
Those of us who have “witnessed the miracles,” as Joseph Juran described it, know that integrating Baldrige can help any organization achieve its goals. Organizations that have fully integrated the model and received the Baldrige Award in recognition of their efforts have produced world-class results in key customer, quality, employee, and financial measures.
So start there, with the results. Senior leaders seek improvement in the measures of the organization’s – and of their – success. Figure out which measures matter most and show how similar organizations achieved excellence by integrating Baldrige.
Next, identify the critical goals and strategic objectives for senior leaders and the obstacles or issues that stand in their way. Chances are, these obstacles fall into common categories:
- Not clear what customers or markets want
- Quality, cycle time, and/or cost need to be improved
- Need innovation in products and services
- Processes do not produce needed results
- Employees not engaged
- No consistency or alignment with what’s really important
All of these issues will be addressed by integrating the Baldrige model, and that’s a key point to make: All of these issues will be addressed, not just the top one or two and not just the most visible obstacles. Every organization functions as a system. You can make tremendous improvement when you understand how your system works and make changes with that systems perspective.
For more information about integrating Baldrige at your organization, click on these articles:
- Study Confirms: Baldrige Gets Results
- How to Integrate Baldrige
- 10 Steps to World Class
- Baldrige Model Item…
Bottom-Up Baldrige
One of the most common questions I get from managers and employees who believe Baldrige is exactly what their organizations need is: How do I get senior leaders to see the value of this?
Paige Lillard has an answer that worked.
I came across an interview on the Baldrige program’s Web site, link here, with Lillard, VP of business excellence at Turner Broadcasting System. Turner Broadcasting employs more than 9,000 people at such networks as CNN, TBS, and TNT.
Lillard has a small consulting team within Turner Broadcasting that is responsible for helping units within the organization achieve their goals. She does this through the Baldrige model.
Lillard was in the audio department in the early 1990s, an extrovert spending her days alone in an audio studio, and she wasn’t happy. She started learning about total quality management and was intrigued by the concept of leveraging employee engagement and involving them in creating and improving processes. She talked to her manager and asked to discuss it with their VP. She asked him what kept him up at night and he said he wanted to get more out of the staff. Lillard outlined her ideas and he supported them and they started building a performance excellence system.
Her interest in TQM led her to Baldrige. She was given permission to form a sub-department to implement test the Baldrige framework. In the first six to nine months, her little group increased customer satisfaction 23%, employee satisfaction 50%, and the capacity of its room 65%. “That was the…
29Sep2011 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Promising Future of Baldrige
On September 14, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science voted to deny funding for the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program for fiscal year 2012. The subcommittee voted to cut the budget for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which the Baldrige program is part of, by about 10%. The bill now goes to the full Senate Appropriations Committee for a vote, after which the Senate will vote on it. The House of Representatives has already voted to eliminate federal funding of the Baldrige program.
The likely end of federal funding does not mean the end of the Baldrige program. Federal funding represents about 19% of the Baldrige program’s $51 million in total annual resources, a figure that includes funds from the Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, application fees, and the volunteer services of nearly a thousand examiners.
While there is no doubt that losing $9.6 million will affect the Baldrige program, Baldrige leaders inside and outside the program have been discussing options for sustaining and growing the program post federal funding. This may include greater roles by the American Society for Quality, which currently administers the program, or private companies, but the Baldrige program will endure.
To some degree, the fact that the Baldrige program was legislated by Congress in 1987 has limited its ability to market Baldrige, as has the fact that too many leaders associate Baldrige with the Award and not with the journey toward performance excellence. Those of us who have helped organizations integrate…
20Sep2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Real Value of a Baldrige Site Visit
Of the 69 applicants for the 2011 Baldrige Award, 11 have made it to the final stage. They will receive site visits in October by a team of examiners who will verify and clarify their applications.
The finalists for the Award are:
- 6 healthcare organizations (40 submitted applications)
- 3 nonprofits/government organizations (14)
- 1 educational organization (8)
- 1 small business (2)
Two manufacturers and three service companies also submitted applications but none was awarded a site visit.
According to the press release from the Baldrige program, “examiners will provide 300 to 1,000 hours of review to each applicant receiving a site visit, and all applicants will receive a detailed report on the organization’s strengths and opportunities for improvement.”
Organizations that take integrating Baldrige seriously recognize that the site visit and resulting feedback are the real value of the Baldrige process. Sure, winning the Baldrige Award is satisfying and rewarding, a testament to the hard work you’ve been doing, but visionary leaders see the Award as recognition for the quality of their management systems while the site visit and feedback drive significant improvements to those systems. They are passionate about improving performance and a Baldrige site visit and feedback report feed that passion.
This has been true since the earliest days of Baldrige. In my book, The Baldrige Quality System, Bill Lesner, a Cadillac plant manager, described the site visit it received in 1990, the year Cadillac won the Baldrige Award:
16Sep2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued“Part of the problem in the day-to-day operation of business is that you see and respond to problems. You ask yourself, ‘Are…
America Needs Baldrige
We want to raise awareness among our elected representatives in Washington about the value of the Baldrige program. On Thursday, September 8th, Baldrige supporters are being asked to email, fax, and/or call their Senators and Congressmen/ Congresswomen to tell them that “America Needs Baldrige.”
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve posted articles about the results achieved by Baldrige organizations. They provide compelling evidence of the value of the program:
- A study by the European Foundation for Quality Management of 120 Award-winning companies, including 24 from the U.S., compared their financial performance to that of similar companies that had not won awards. Five years after receiving their awards, these companies outperformed the comparison companies by 77% in sales, 44% in assets, and 18% in operating income.
- Cargill has an internal Baldrige assessment process. The cumulative earnings after tax vs. budget of business units that have a high degree of deployment of the Baldrige model is 30% compared to 13% for those with partial deployment and -12% for those just starting the Baldrige journey.
- The five two-time Baldrige Award winners grew significantly between their first and second Awards: 67% in number of sites; 63% in jobs; and 93% in revenue
This Thursday, please take a few minutes to tell your federal representatives why America Needs Baldrige:
Step 1: Prepare to participate in America Needs Baldrige by looking up contact information for your Senators and Congressman/Congresswoman:
- Go to www.congress.org
- Enter your home zip code; some sites may also have you enter your street address
- Click on each elected official to get detailed…
