Business
Contrasting Innovative Tact: Google & Apple
Performance and quality are judged by an organization’s customers. In order to understand your customers’ needs, your organization must take into account all product features, characteristics, modes of customer access, and support that contribute value as seen by your customers.
Customer-driven excellence means much more than reducing defects and errors, merely meeting specifications, or reducing complaints. In a recent article from the International Herald Times, Steve Lohr points to the very different models of innovation that the supernovas from Silicon Valley utilize; Google and Apple are constantly working to expand their market and, ultimately, bottom line.
A customer-driven organization striving to meet Baldrige Award requirements addresses not only the product and service characteristics that meet basic customer requirements, but also those features and characteristics that differentiate the organization from its competitors. Google is this type of a customer-driven innovator, as they are constantly developing and modifying their products and services in attempt to glean instant feedback from users. They are regularly asking for customer opinions, testing new “labs,” and attempting to simplify their products to impress the end-user. This unique formula, with its emphasis on regularly testing ideas and products with customers, amounts to applying, “the scientific method to market-opportunity identification,” says Errol B. Arkilic, Program Director at the National Science Foundation. It is directed towards customer retention and loyalty, market share gain and growth, as well as demanding close attention to the voice of the customer.
The Apple model, on the contrary, is much more refined, intuitive, and top-down. Lohr reports that when asked…
2Feb2012 | Tom Huizenga | 0 comments | ContinuedJuran Institute Acquires Baldrige.com
Juran Institute, Inc. is pleased to announce the acquisition of Baldrige.com into our family of quality solutions and services. Our legendary founder, Dr. Joseph M. Juran, was a particularly vocal advocate for the Baldrige program. Prior to the passage of the congressional act that created the Baldrige Award in 1987, he testified in front of Congress on behalf of creating the award to help bring the focus of quality to the United States. Dr. Juran was also one of the original overseers of the Baldrige Award process. Juran Institute has offered its own staff in support of the Baldrige process, many of whom have participated in the roles of Judges, Sr. Examiners, and Examiners.
Let me personally thank Steve George for all of his contributions to this website and to the Baldrige process overall. We will continue to focus the site on the same principles that Steve did, which will be to offer insights and information on the Baldrige model as an archetype for performance excellence. We will offer articles, links, and information directly related to the Baldrige categories that will be both relevant and interesting to our readers. We also will have Steve join us from time to time as a guest author.
Baldrige.com will be managed by Joseph A. De Feo, President and CEO of Juran Institute, as well as Tom Huizenga, our General Manager and Baldrige examiner. Both of us were personally managed and coached by Dr. Juran prior to joining Juran Institute. We have led extensive careers in quality…
23Jan2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Expands Reach to Small Businesses
The Baldrige program is expanding its reach to small businesses through a new collaboration with the Alliance for Performance Excellence and The Alternative Board (TAB). The Alliance is a nonprofit network of national, state, and local Baldrige-based award programs. TAB provides peer advisory boards and coaching services for small business leaders.
According to a press release from the Baldrige program, the state programs will work with TAB boards across the country to help small business operators learn the Baldrige Criteria and use the Criteria to assess and improve performance.
The new effort drew praise from Terry May, president of MESA Products, a 2006 Baldrige Award recipient in the small business category. “TAB is a great resource for learning and sharing with my peers,” May said, “providing real-world, practical guidance to help me improve and grow my business. The Baldrige process, both at the state and national levels, helped me take MESA to an even higher level of performance and achieve breakthrough results. So, a partnership between local TAB boards and state Baldrige programs will be a great resource for small businesses.”
The collaboration between the Baldrige program and the Alliance is another indicator of the new relationship between the programs. Earlier this month, the Baldrige program announced new conditions that basically require organizations to earn state recognition before applying for the Baldrige Award (more here). Strengthening the relationship is an important step in maintaining the viability of the Baldrige program in the face of federal funding cuts.
29Dec2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedPublisher Wins Baldrige Award
I grew up in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod: baptized and confirmed, eight years in parochial school, Sunday School and church every Sunday, graduated from Concordia College in St. Paul and taught for four years in a Missouri Synod elementary school. Concordia is a popular Missouri Synod name: The Concordia University System includes ten colleges and universities, many of the synod’s churches use the Concordia name, and the publishing arm of the synod is the Concordia Publishing House (CPH), which is the only non-healthcare recipient of the 2011 Baldrige Award.
It’s a well-deserved honor. CPH has 247 employees and revenues of $35 million and provides more than 8,000 products to members of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It excels at customer service, starting with 98% customer satisfaction scores, exceeding the benchmark for U.S. call centers. It’s Customer Call Center has been considered a “Center of Excellence” by Purdue University each of the last three years.
Innovation helps CPH build customer relationships. Its Center for Client Retention collects and analyzes data from customers of competitors, categorizing sales and customer trends in more than 50 different ways to correlate product sales and types of customers. Its Emerging Products team studies how to use new technologies to deliver innovative products. The number of electronic products offered by CPH grew from 457 in 2008 to 1,927 in 2010.
CPH also excels at building relationships with its employees. Overall workforce engagement has exceeded the AAIM (formerly known as American Association of Industrial Management for Employers Association) national benchmark in seven…
8Dec2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedStop the Race to the Bottom
Ecolab CEO Doug Baker recently claimed in a StarTribune commentary that Minnesota’s tax rate is “a barrier to attracting and sometimes keeping top talent.” I think that’s baloney.
Let’s say the “top talent” is a single person who earns a taxable income of $150,000 a year, surely at the low end for really top talent. Minnesota taxes currently take $11,775 of that. The Minnesota rate is about the same rate as the states of Wisconsin, New York, and North Carolina, higher than Illinois, North Dakota, and Missouri, and lower than Iowa, California, and Maine.
Baker claims our high personal income taxes are already a barrier, but our rates are not out of line with most other states. The average state tax rate, not counting the states with no state taxes, is around 6 percent for a single earner taxable income of $150,000. One would hope the quality of life in Minnesota—not to mention the opportunity to work at companies like Ecolab, 3M, Cargill, General Mills, Medtronic, Mayo Clinic, Best Buy, and many others—would more than offset the extra couple grand in state taxes the top talent would accrue here. If that was truly a sticking point, I’m guessing Ecolab could bump their salary offer a couple percent to cover it.
Of course, companies like Ecolab could always move their operations to one of the states with no income taxes. I’m sure South Dakota would welcome them with open arms, but I’m guessing the “top talent” would be reluctant to follow.
Governor Dayton has proposed…
12Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued6 Reasons to Revive US Manufacturing
The impetus for the Baldrige program in the late 1980s was improving manufacturing in the United States. The original criteria reflected a manufacturing mindset that has evolved to fit all types of organizations, but it wasn’t until the third year of the Baldrige Award that a service company, FedEx, won the Award.
Despite its origin in manufacturing, the Award has little appeal for manufacturers today. Only a few manufacturers apply for the Baldrige Award each year while 54 healthcare organizations submitted applications in 2010. Last year, only three manufacturers, among 83 total applicants, applied for the Award, although some of the seven small business applicants may have been manufacturers.
Reviving Baldrige in manufacturing can help revive manufacturing in the U.S. Why is manufacturing so important? Jon Rynn lists six reasons it is central to the economy in an article in new deal 2.0:
- Manufacturing has been the path to development. “From the rise of England in the 19th century, to the rise of the U.S., Germany, Japan and the USSR in the 20th, to the newly industrializing countries like Korea, Taiwan, and now China, manufacturing has been the key to prosperity.”
- Manufacturing is the foundation of global “Great Power.” “About 80% of the world’s production of factory machinery has been controlled by what we would consider the ‘Great Powers.’ Until the 1950s, the U.S. had produced about 50%; we now produce less than China’s 16%.”
- Manufacturing is the most important cause of economic growth. “No machinery industries, no sustained, long-term economic growth.”
- Global trade is based on goods, not services. “According…
Marketing Baldrige
IndustryWeek recently published a viewpoint article titled, “Time for U.S. Companies to Refocus on the Malcolm Baldrige Award?” Andy Tannen, director of strategy and development for MSLGroup’s Corporate Practice, argues that “maybe it’s time for U.S. companies again to pay more attention to the Baldrige Award.”
Based on my experience, American organizations could have benefitted from Baldrige every year since the program started in 1988. I worked with four Baldrige Award winners in the 1990s and they all improved performance by integrating the Baldrige model. The need has been consistent for more than two decades even if this proven solution has remained largely invisible to most senior leaders.
Tannen focuses on one aspect of the Baldrige model to argue for its resurgence: quality management. He points to three companies that have suffered quality failures recently: Toyota, Johnson & Johnson, and GlaxoSmithKline. In Barron’s 2011 “Most Respected Companies” survey, Toyota dropped from number 6 to 46, J&J sunk from number 1 or 2 to number 25, and GSK fell from 36 to 51. Tannen believes that, for these three companies and their peers, “meeting the [Baldrige] program’s precision standards can help make the U.S. more competitive.”
I agree. I would amend his statement to say that integrating the Baldrige model can help make the U.S. more competitive, which is why the Award was launched in the first place, but I agree that Baldrige has the potential to transform the quality and effectiveness of American organizations.
How do we turn potential into reality? Despite a proven history of…
28Mar2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
