How Can You Stay on Top?
For years, if you wanted the highest quality car, you bought a Toyota. Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler floundered. Toyota’s reputation grew. The Toyota Production System was the poster child for Lean, for eliminating waste and shortening cycle times while improving quality in the process.
And then its goal changed from being first in quality to being first in global sales. A culture built on slow-and-steady, where teams were given months to find solutions and leaders spent years developing their capabilities, gave way to quicker product launches, faster plant openings, and rapidly expanding supplier networks. Customer started to grumble. Flaws appeared. Recalls tarnished a reputation that seemed indestructible.
The Baldrige Criteria ask how you create a sustainable organization. That’s not the same question as how you sustain a great organization, and based on results, you can’t, at least not indefinitely. Companies rise and fall. Some reach the top and dominate the landscape for years, even decades, but they, too, eventually lose the lead.
Why is that inevitable? The Baldrige model can help your organization achieve performance excellence and it can help you sustain it, but for how long? New owners and chief executives enforce new agendas, hungry competitors draw away customers, and markets, economies, and industries change.
So how can you stay on top? Or is it impossible?
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