Toyota’s front-page fall-from-grace has rivaled that of Tiger Woods, a business world parallel to the sporting world’s latest scandal. No wonder. Our business publications, from BusinessWeek to Fortune to Fast Company to the Wall Street Journal, weave their stories around the companies and executives who have risen to the top today. It is a cult of personality, no different than the teams and stars in the athletic world or the TV shows and actors in the entertainment world. We read about a company’s breakthrough performance or an executive’s startling turnaround and we place them on a pedestal and feel betrayed when they fall off.

They always do, of course. No company or leader can sustain performance excellence indefinitely. There are Baldrige Award winners that have failed after they received the Award, but so what? The Baldrige Award doesn’t guarantee unending success. It simply recognizes that, in the year it was received, that organization was one of the best-run organizations in the country. Next year, who knows? It’s like winning the Super Bowl one year (not that I’d know what that’s like, living in Minnesota) and expecting to win it next year and the year after, ad infinitum.

We’re focusing on the wrong thing. Baldrige Award winners have a lot to teach us about designing, managing, and improving effective processes in all areas of a management system. They have the results that show how well those processes work. We can learn from them. There’s nothing special about them. Their leaders are no more brilliant than your leaders. They don’t have magic processes that produce flawless results faster than humanly possible. They’ve learned, adapted, innovated, and persisted. Your organization can do that, too.

Baldrige.com is committed to bringing you the information you need to build the organization you want. No hero worship here—although we do get a little giddy about an exceptional process. Our goal is to share the ideas, approaches, and best practices that can benefit all parts of your management system with the understanding that this information, like the organizations it comes from, has a shelf life.

So pull yourself away from the pedestal and get back to work on those fundamental changes that can make your organization better. That’s what the real heroes do.

To read more about how to improve your organization, click on these articles:

• 10 Steps to World Class
• 80 Critical Questions
• Baldrige Gets Results
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• Making Change Happen

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