1 | Leadership
Baldrige Fits In Everywhere!
A recent FastCompany article entitled “How the Most Successful Brands Take a Peek into the Future” wound itself around a handful of facets that a successful futures-insights company should embrace. The author, Mark McNeilly, wrote about organizations having the ability to take advantage of the future by listening to their customers, competitors, and comparables. Perhaps inadvertently, he has summarized a number of Baldrige criteria questions, and in doing so gave yet another example of how Baldrige can be applied in any organization, regardless of size or industry.
Real-time marketing requires a team of coordinated, aware, and proactive individuals. With the mindset of out-performing competitors, most companies have turned to social media to try and get a better grasp of their who their customers are, and engage in “culture conversations.” McNeilly writes about Oreo’s use of Twitter during the Super Bowl blackout: “Within the hour the tweet had been RT’d over 10,000 times. Oreo was successful at executing their marketing virtually instantaneously because its social media trackers, agency creatives, and marketing execs were all co-located.” In Baldrige lingo, what Oreo did answered the questions in section 3.1 (VOTC) referring to using social media to listen to, interact with, and observe customers, as well as section 3.2 (Customer Engagement) on leveraging social media to enhance customer engagement and relationships with the organization. They were very aware of what their …
19Mar2013 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | Continued
Begin at the Beginning: The Organizational Profile
Whether you’re ready to write your application for the Baldrige Award, or you’re just dabbling in the criteria, creating an organizational profile of your company is the place to begin. It’s like a summary of sorts, and can help you identify your performance gaps at an early stage. If your Baldrige application can be compared to a thesis, your organizational profile is the introduction.
If you’re scratching your head still and asking, “So, where do I start?” like those folks in the Cars.com commercials that inevitably chase a line across the floor to a dealership, you might need someone to point you in the right direction. You’ve come to the right place.
Start at the top. What does your company offer? Hopefully, that’s an easy one to answer. Why is what you’re selling important? If nobody needs or wants it, nobody will buy it. How do you deliver? Obviously, a hospital would answer those questions very differently than a large retail store, so clarity and detail are important. What are your mission and vision for the company? Usually these answers will revolve around the core competencies of your company, or its strengths and areas of greatest expertise. These strengths are what set you apart from your competitors, and are how you fulfill your mission and vision. They should be unique to you and not a regurgitation of …
29Jan2013 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedAt Baldrige.com, We’re More Than Just a Pretty Face
Did you know that Baldrige.com is more than just a resource library? Not only do we love to write about the Baldrige Award and all those who endeavor for quality, but we also offer assessments, training, strategic advice and support, and various improvement programs.
Looking for help with the Strategic Planning portion of the Baldrige criteria, particularly with aligning your business goals and objectives? We provide advice, coaching, facilitating, and education to enable your organization to link its strategy and goals with every business unit and employee to assure the goals are met. Perhaps the Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management section is where your company is lacking, and you need assistance developing a truly balanced scorecard. A proper scorecard has to include the right measures and targets to effectively monitor the performance of an organization, but determining those metrics can sometimes be the most challenging part. We can help with that. Ready to plan and design your new services? With a variety of structured processes, we can help you select the most practical fit for your organization. Are you in need of a controlled improvement program? The number of ways we can help your organization are endless, as we customize each program to your specifications.
Perhaps your trials and tribulations are more ambiguous; it’s hard to identify the cause of the problems, but you’re certain there are problems to …
7Dec2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedDoes Your Organization Have Good Perspective?
The Baldrige criteria provide a systems perspective for managing your organization and its key processes to achieve results – and to strive for performance excellence. The seven categories, the core values, and the scoring guidelines form the building blocks and the integrating mechanism for the system. However, successful management of overall performance requires organization-specific synthesis, alignment, and integration.
Synthesis means looking at your organization as a whole and building on key business attributes, including your core competencies, strategic objectives, action plans, and work systems. Alignment means using the key linkages among requirements given in the Baldrige criteria categories to ensure consistency of plans, processes, measures, and actions. Integration builds on alignment so that the individual components of your performance management system operate in a fully interconnected manner and deliver anticipated results.
Henry Ford Health Systems, a 2011 Baldrige Award recipient, is one of the country’s largest health care systems, exceeding $4 billion in revenues, and is a national leader in clinical care, research and education. It includes the 1,200-member Henry Ford Medical Group, five hospitals, Health Alliance Plan, Henry Ford Physician Network, 32 primary care centers and many other health-related entities throughout southeast Michigan. In 2010, Henry Ford provided nearly $200 million in uncompensated care. The health system is also a major economic driver in Michigan and employs more than 24,000.
HFHS’s commitment to patient safety is emphasized through …
1Nov2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedHappy 25th to the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award!!
“The Baldrige Award Program is still one of the best in the entire maelstrom of awards. There’s the Nobel Prize, the Oscars, and all that, but the Baldrige Aware is right up there! It’s inspiring. It’s exciting. It makes us proud.”
-Letitia Baldrige, etiquette expert, former chief of staff for Jacqueline Kennedy, and sister of Malcolm Baldrige
In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, we’ve pulled 25 questions from the Criteria that we think most people would like to know about their company. Would you like your organization to answer some of these questions? Has your company considered applying for the Baldrige Award, or even implementing the Criteria? If not, consider the 10 Steps to World Class.
- What are the key elements that engage your workforce in accomplishing your mission and vision?
- How do senior leaders create a workforce culture that delivers a consistently positive customer experience and fosters customer engagement?
- How do senior leaders include a focus on creating and balancing value for customers and other stakeholders in their organizational performance expectations?
- How do you evaluate the performance of your senior leaders, including the chief executive?
- How do you address any adverse impacts on society of your products and operations?
- How does your organization promote and ensure ethical behavior in all interactions?
- How do you consider societal well-being and benefit as part
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Acknowledging Excellence – Pal’s Sudden Service
In 2001, Pal’s Sudden Service was the first restaurant company of any size to earn the Baldrige National Quality Award, and was the first in Tennessee to be twice awarded the Tennessee Quality Excellence Award. Nation’s Restaurant News (NRN) recently ran their bi-monthly publication (which has over 60,000 subscribers) highlighting how Pal’s metrics are “nearly unheard of in the food service world.” They aren’t stingy about sharing the secrets to their success either; every month they share their success stories with the Pal’s Business Excellence Institute (BEI), which sees hundreds of business leaders come through its doors annually. K&N Management, another food service operation and 2010 Baldrige Award recipient, has visited the BEI 13 times in the past nine years! At this point, you may be asking yourself, who, or what, is Pal’s?
Pal’s Sudden Service runs 23 double-drive-through restaurants in Tennessee and Virginia, and averages about $2 million per unit since its conception in 1956. When they aren’t busy winning awards (Pal’s was also just awarded a prestigious international award for the visual appearance and navigation of their website by the International Academy of Visual Arts), Pal’s is heavily focused on delivering excellent customer service. With their double-sided buildings, they can serve a customer at the drive-through every 18 seconds. Even at this rate, they make only one mistake every 3,500 orders, and maintain a customer satisfaction score …
31Jul2012 | Tom Huizenga | 0 comments | ContinuedQuality and Sustainability: An Introduction
Organizations large and small that have gained success in the past and want to thrive in the future are being challenged to find – and capitalize upon – opportunities to meet their own strategic goals while also meeting societal needs. More and more organizations are being encouraged to look at the entire landscape unfolding before them, from a perspective of a balanced array of outcomes characterized by the new “triple bottom line” of people, planet, and profits (Savitz and Weber 2006). As we go forward into the twenty-first century, organizations cannot focus only on profits and their bottom line; they also must take into consideration people and our planet. Quality Management has always taken people into consideration; now as we go forward a third dimension has been added that encompasses environment sustainability and stewardship.
Quality and environmental sustainability are becoming increasingly interdependent. Organizations of all sizes are looking at ways to increase efficiencies and productivity without compromising the integrity of the environment. As a result, as we see it, there is a paradigm shift evolving within the quality management arena as quality and environmental sustainability are merging toward a partnership. This partnership makes perfect sense; the performance excellence we strive for in a business environment extends to the larger, natural environment that provides the context in which businesses operate.
The partnership accelerated with the creation of the ISO (International Organization …
2Jul2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | Continued
