Government
Acknowledging Innovative Excellence – The City of Irving, Texas
It’s not every year that a city wins the Mac Baldrige Award; in fact, Irving is only the second to have ever done it. Part of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Irving contains Las Colinas, one of the first master-planned developments in the United States. The Dallas-Fort Worth Airport also falls within its 68 square miles. The city is over a hundred years old, but didn’t see much growth until the manufacturing, transportation, and finance industries moved in during the 1930s, opening the doors for huge organizations like Citigroup, Verizon, Nokia, Allstate, Microsoft, Neiman Marcus, ExxonMobil, and Kimberly-Clark. In 2011, Irving was awarded the Texas Award for Performance Excellence, qualifying it for the big B.
So, how did they do it? Mayor Beth Van Duyne reached out for some extra help. Freese and Nichols, Inc. is a multi-discipline consulting firm that offers services in engineering, architecture, environmental science, planning, construction services, and program management. It doesn’t hurt that they are 2010 Baldrige Award recipients, and based out of Fort Worth, Texas. Freese and Nichols worked with Irving through their initial processes, helped review Irving’s application, practice for site visits, and did mock interviews with innumerable staff members in an effort to help make everyone on the city payroll to become more comfortable with the Baldrige Criteria. In addition, they shared best practices, and considering that F&N received the National and Tarrant …
26Feb2013 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | Continued
Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control win 2012 Baldrige Award
To date, more than 1,500 American organizations have applied for the Baldrige Award, and 93 organizations have received it. There are quality award programs in nearly every state that model themselves after the Baldrige criteria, and nearly 100 international programs that have done the same. A 2011 study estimated that Baldrige program’s benefit-to-cost ratio to U.S. businesses was 820:1. For the first time, Baldrige Award applicants were required to have previously received their state’s performance excellence award.
Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control (MFC) designs, develops, manufactures, and supports advanced combat, missile, rocket, and sensor systems for the U.S. and foreign military. MFC is headquartered in Grand Prarie, Texas, and employs over 10,000 people producing more than 100 products in over 60 countries. The company is Lockheed Martin’s lead business for research, development, and protection of electro-optical and smart munitions systems. Lockheed Martin’s corporate net sales for 2011 were $46.5 billion.
This year, they have been honored with receiving the Baldrige Award. Some highlights from their award application have been selected below:
- ROI has grown at a 23% compound annual rate, faster than the industry-best competitor at 13.7%.
- From 2006 to 2011, annual orders from repeat customers have increased by 32% and international orders have increased by almost 400%.
- In 2011, close to 85% of employees said that they were proud to work for MFC, exceeding the national benchmark
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How Would You Measure a Society’s Performance?
If you could apply the Baldrige model to a society, how would you measure its performance?
One way would be to identify key indicators of performance excellence. One indicator would be productivity, which many organizations include in their Baldrige applications. The following chart, from an article in Mother Jones, shows that productivity in the U.S. has improved by 80% since 1979. According to NationMaster.com, the U.S. ranks second in overall productivity behind only Luxembourg.
Some of that is due to automation and technology, but it’s also because Americans are working harder. Forty percent of professional men and 23% of middle-income men work more than 50 hours a week. In a healthy society, one would expect that the people responsible for improving productivity—and working longer and harder to do it—would benefit from their efforts. Not in the United States. As the blue line on the chart shows, average overall wages increased about 3% in 30 years. As Mother Jones reports, “If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.”
The red line on the chart shows where some of the value of our productivity increase has gone. More is going for corporate profits, which are up 20% in 20 years. As the blue line on the chart and our high unemployment rate indicate, tax cuts for the …
22Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedVictory for Quality
On Wednesday, President Obama appointed Dr. Don Berwick to run Medicare and Medicaid. Just to summarize Berwick’s credentials, he’s a pediatrician, clinical professor at the Harvard Medical School, former leader and advisor on a number of government councils and task forces aimed at improving the quality of healthcare, and a former Baldrige Judge.
I wrote about Berwick’s nomination on April 19th, pointing out that the immediate past president of the American Medical Association said that he “is widely known and well respected for his visionary efforts that focus on optimizing the quality and safety of patient care.” According to USA Today, his “nomination was immediately hailed as a brilliant choice by policy experts from across the ideological spectrum.”
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid have not had a permanent administrator since October 2006. Obama nominated the perfect person to fix this problem while addressing a much bigger one: how to deliver high-quality patient care for less. Berwick’s Baldrige and healthcare background provide an unusual systems perspective for tackling an issue that is critical to the country and to all Americans.
Kudos to Obama for finding the right person and for making the recess appointment that puts him to work.
For those keeping score of Baldrige people in high positions, we now have Berwick at Medicare and Medicaid; Terry Holliday, former superintendent of Baldrige Award-winning Iredell-Statesville Schools, now …
8Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedChanging County Processes
What happens when a new county executive initiates radical change? Exactly what you would expect.
Jeffrey Smith came to Santa Clara County to help close a $230 million deficit. He implemented hoshin kanri (policy deployment), which some moronic union official described as “some airy-fairy thing.” Many of the people responsible for doing the planning ignored him and a number of department heads submitted budgets the old way, according to a story on MercuryNews.com (“Santa Clara County new executive’s strategy has fans, skeptics,” Julia Prodis Sulek, May 14, 2010).
Smith has taken a county hospital from the threat of losing $300 million in funding because of a pattern of violence to a national award for patient safety. He’s a former doctor, lawyer, and hospital administrator and he understands that the same old, same old just won’t work anymore.
“We can no longer rely on old processes and procedures,” he says. “My job is to enable the organization to make the dramatic changes, which will be difficult.”
Hoshin kanri, popularized by Toyota, helps an organization focus on a shared vision and goals and involves people in developing strategic and action plans to achieve those goals. I worked with Zytec in 1991 when it won the Baldrige Award and one of the reasons it won was its robust hoshin kanri process.
One of Smith’s responsibilities is the county’s Valley Medical Center, which …
25May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSupport Berwick!
Last week I posted an article about how President Obama had nominated Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Berwick is a former Baldrige judge, a current Harvard professor, and the president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a nonprofit that promotes innovative ways to improve patient care. He has been a forceful voice for systemic change to America’s healthcare system.
In the article, I warned about a likely Republican effort to block the nomination, which would have nothing to do with Berwick and everything to do with partisan politics. Well, no sooner had I posted the article than the Republican Policy Committee prepared a memo denigrating Berwick. You can read the memo and its refutation on Think Progress, but here is a key passage:
Donald Berwick…has a history of support for government rationing of health care resources on cost grounds. He has spoken favorably about Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which denies patients access to life-saving treatments the National Health Service (NHS) deems too expensive. The American people should have their eyes open to the ramifications of NICE-style rationing in the United States as part of Democrats’ brave new health care world.
In reality, Berwick supports less intensive, less invasive, and less expensive healthcare if it is more effective than the most aggressive care. In the Republican …
27Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBureaucracy Detector Test
As a native Iowan, I’m proud to pass along the Bureaucracy Detector Test, developed by Iowa’s Department of Management to expose performance gaps in state government. It turns out that, with a few wording changes, you can apply the test to any organization. Here’s the test:
Bureaucracy Detector Test
Rate the following on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 7 (often):
- ____ To what extent do agencies in your jurisdiction feel accountable for following rules, regulations, and procedures prescribed in law or policy?
- ____ To what extent do agencies in your jurisdiction feel accountable for producing measurable outcomes for people?
- ____ To what extent to agencies in your jurisdiction encounter rules or procedures that impair their ability to perform?
- ____ To what extent are agencies in your jurisdiction allowed to interpret the application of a rule or law themselves, as opposed to having someone in another agency responsible for enforcing the rule or law make the interpretation?
- ____ To what extent do agencies in your jurisdiction spend time or money to comply with rules, laws, or reporting requirements that they feel are a waste of time?
- ____ To what extent do the people in agencies responsible for enforcing administrative rules and regulations understand the work in a frontline agency and what is important to the success of the frontline agency in meeting the needs of those that agency
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