Other Recent Articles
Best-Run Business in America?
Let me tell you about one of the best articles ever written about Baldrige in the mainstream press. “We Will Be the Best-Run Business in America,” by Leigh Buchanan, appeared in Inc. magazine on January 24, 2012. You will find the article here.
Buchanan tells the story of Larry Potterfield and the company he founded, MidwayUSA, a small business that sells shooting supplies and hunting gear. Midway won the Baldrige Award in 2009.
Potterfield was first exposed to Baldrige in the mid-1990s, but it wasn’t until 2003 that he embraced it. “He immersed himself in the award criteria,” Buchanan writes, “then personally taught them to 27 managers and executives.” He told the workforce that Midway would win a Missouri Quality Award in 2008 and a Baldrige Award in 2009. The company’s new goal is to win a second Baldrige Award in 2015.
Midway has approximately 370 employees. Every year, senior leaders choose 10 to 14 high-potential employees to serves as Missouri Quality Award or Baldrige examiners. It’s the company’s leadership development program. “I absolutely love this process,” Buchanan quotes Jake Dablemont, Midway’s HR manager. “If I look at the value of what I’ve learned in grad school versus what I’ve learned as an examiner, I would choose to be an examiner every day of the week.”
Potterfield believes Baldrige is foundational to Midway’s goal to be the best-run company in America, and to America if it is to remain…
21Feb2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
(8 votes, average: 4.38 out of 5)
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Visionary Leadership
Your organization’s senior leaders should set customer focused directions with clear and visible values, and high expectations. In addition, today’s global business leaders need to adopt a strong understanding of the major societal forces shaping our world, as well as to know where and how to respond for the good of their organization and for society as a whole. Leaders should also ensure the creation of strategies, systems, and methods for achieving performance excellence, stimulating innovation, building knowledge and capabilities, and ensuring organizational sustainability.
In order to gain the benefit of the entire workforce, senior leaders should inspire and encourage their entire organization to participate, develop and learn, be innovative, and embrace change. An understanding of the business risks and opportunities of environmental and social trends is expected of today’s leaders, in addition to how their sector and other stakeholders are responding to them. Louis Têtu, CEO of a tech company called Coveo, explains the necessary ability of a leader to bridge the gap between current knowledge and knowledge needed to take action. In his opinion, the world is moving “180 degrees away from Henry Ford’s product-centric business model to a customer-centric one, and we start to see the immense power of being able to find the right information quickly. In a product-centric world, you could take weeks and months to research. In a customer-centric world, you only get a minute, even less if the customer on…
17Feb2012 | Tom Huizenga | 0 comments | Continued (7 votes, average: 4.29 out of 5) Loading ...
Baldrige Impacts: Looking Back and Moving Forward
The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program is transitioning to a sustainable enterprise model, aiming to demonstrate its widespread impact by showing results. The Award promotes excellence in organizational performance, recognizes the achievements and results of U.S. organizations, and publicizes successful performance strategies. No matter the size or nature of your organization, the award Criteria are an excellent resource in your journey towards performance excellence.
Integrating Baldrige is a proven path to producing high-performing organizations, as the results of Baldrige Award winners confirm. The Baldrige model has identified the beliefs and behaviors of high-performing organizations. Its 11 core values and concepts, embedded in the Baldrige Criteria and evident in Baldrige Award recipients, are essential to achieving performance excellence.
More than 35 states have a Baldrige-based program which have relied on the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence and other intellectual property and resources, but operate without financial support from the Baldrige program. The Criteria ask more than 250 questions about how your organization does what it does. The answers to those questions help leaders understand their organization’s strengths and opportunities for improvement. They also provide a systems perspective (a Baldrige core value) that enables senior leaders to focus everyone in the organization on what must be done for the organization to succeed.
According to a recent Thomson Reuters report, healthcare organizations that have won Baldrige Quality Awards or have been considered for a site visit were six times more likely to be counted among…
13Feb2012 | Tom Huizenga | 0 comments | Continued (7 votes, average: 4.29 out of 5) Loading ...
Wanted: High Quality and Safety in Food
From a quality perspective, the difference between food production and goods manufacturing is huge. Food production processes materials by converting raw goods such as wheat into other products, including flour, bread, and cookies. Goods manufacturing assembles materials into products like electronics, appliances, or automobiles. This fundamental difference poses unique challenges for quality professionals in the food production industry.
Why does food need to be managed differently?
Raw materials such as fruit and vegetables differ from item to item, day to day, and crop to crop. If the final produced good is out of spec, it cannot be distilled or disassembled back to its original component parts, as those parts do not retain their original identity like assembled products can. These fundamental chemical differences require a fundamentally different quality approach.
Challenges facing food producers today
The ultimate goal for food producers is to develop a quality system that is rich in customer sensory data, applies exact measurement of raw material qualities, and ensures a production process that is always in control and capable of producing the highest quality of food possible. The customers include a wide range of characters: ultimate consumers or restaurateur who purchases the product, the supermarket that needs to make money selling the product, and the regulatory agencies that are in place to ensure food safety.
Missing anything that is critical to quality (CTQ) could mean not being able to sell the product because the user did not like it, or it harmed a…
8Feb2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | Continued (5 votes, average: 4.60 out of 5) Loading ...
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,…
2Feb2012 | Tom Huizenga | 0 comments | Continued (10 votes, average: 4.30 out of 5) Loading ...
The Customer Is Still #1
In today’s global economy and competitive business world, fully satisfying your customers is imperative. Empowered by technology, dissatisfied customers tend to share their experiences with anyone who is willing to listen or read about their stories. When these experiences are negative, the effects on an organization can be detrimental. For many customers, the service landscape of recent years has become almost unrecognizable as they navigate through company websites and voice response systems, wait for delayed shipments only to receive the wrong goods or become frustrated over language barriers in their discussions with suppliers’ service representatives. These experiences do not do much to build customer satisfaction and loyalty. Despite countless companies struggling to operate profitably and respond to customer needs, there are organizations doing it right. In fact, some companies are delivering benchmark quality products and services to their customers.
Delivering quality products and services that meet customer’s needs separates the leaders from the pack in a competitive marketplace and it is essential to survival in a competitive global marketplace. Those organizations that engage in a relentless pursuit of delivering high-quality products and services outperform those that do not. MEDRAD, one of the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award winners, uses a systematic voice-of-the-customer approach to better focus on customer needs. Customer information is collected from listening posts, trade associations, benchmarking, and other mechanisms deployed globally and tailored by region, business, and language, and then communicated to the appropriate sales…
30Jan2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | Continued (11 votes, average: 4.64 out of 5) Loading ...
Societal Responsibility
Without socially responsible leaders, organizations striving towards performance excellence in today’s market will get left behind. Ethical behavior and considerations for societal well-being are crucial elements to running a quality business. Leaders need to be role models for their organization by focusing on ethics and the protection of public health, safety, and the environment. The protection of these three elements includes the organization’s operations, as well as the life cycles of products. Effective planning will help to anticipate adverse impacts from production, distribution, transportation, use, and disposal of products.
Effective planning will help to prevent problems, provide a response if problems occur, and make available information and support needed to maintain public awareness, safety, and confidence. Henry Ford Health System, one of the winners of the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award for Health Care, know how to think about these big-picture issues; HFHS community benefit initiatives have increased by almost 78 percent since 2006. HFHS’s commitment to patient safety is further emphasized through its evidence-based global harm campaign (evidence-based medicine integrates an individual doctor’s examining and diagnostic skills for a specific patient with the best available evidence from medical research) to reduce or eliminate some 23 sources of harm. According to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, this program is a national best practice. HFHS’s performance in relation to overall global harm has improved from approximately 60 harm events per 1,000 patients in the first quarter of 2008 to…
26Jan2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | Continued (8 votes, average: 4.25 out of 5) Loading ...
