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 faces budget problems. Seven of the county’s eight clinics are not accepting new patients because they are overloaded. Smith wants to help people solve the problems that will improve efficiency.

“The key is to unburden people,” he says. “The way to do that is to give them the tools to manage change and give them the time to actually solve problems.”

We wish him luck. One of his actions that upset people was to dismiss a $20 million Deloitte audit of Valley Med that his predecessor had approved. Instead, he had a $100,000 assessment of the hospital. Now, we can only hope he used the Baldrige Criteria for that assessment.

To read more about strategic planning and effective government, click on these articles:

• The City as a Baldrige System
• Transforming Politics
• Serving Citizens Better
• 10 Critical Questions: Strategic Planning
• Alignment and Integration

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