All Posts Tagged With: "Baldrige"
Juran Institute Acquires Baldrige.com
Juran Institute, Inc. is pleased to announce the acquisition of Baldrige.com into our family of quality solutions and services. Our legendary founder, Dr. Joseph M. Juran, was a particularly vocal advocate for the Baldrige program. Prior to the passage of the congressional act that created the Baldrige Award in 1987, he testified in front of Congress on behalf of creating the award to help bring the focus of quality to the United States. Dr. Juran was also one of the original overseers of the Baldrige Award process. Juran Institute has offered its own staff in support of the Baldrige process, many of whom have participated in the roles of Judges, Sr. Examiners, and Examiners.
Let me personally thank Steve George for all of his contributions to this website and to the Baldrige process overall. We will continue to focus the site on the same principles that Steve did, which will be to offer insights and information on the Baldrige model as an archetype for performance excellence. We will offer articles, links, and information directly related to the Baldrige categories that will be both relevant and interesting to our readers. We also will have Steve join us from time to time as a guest author.
Baldrige.com will be managed by Joseph A. De Feo, President and CEO of Juran Institute, as well as Tom Huizenga, our General Manager and Baldrige examiner. Both of us were personally managed and coached by Dr. Juran prior to joining Juran Institute. We have led extensive careers in quality…
23Jan2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedJuran Institute Acquires Baldrige.com
I am pleased to announce the sale of Baldrige.com to the Juran Institute. Founded by quality guru Dr. Joseph M. Juran in 1979, the Juran Institute offers a broad range of services to help organizations improve performance, including Baldrige Assessment and consulting, Lean and Six Sigma, change management, quality planning, team building, and the Juran Management System. You can learn more about the company here.
Dr. Juran was a vocal advocate for the Baldrige program. I interviewed him in 1991 for my first book on the Baldrige model and he was kind enough to write a reference for the book. At the end of the interview, he not only invited me to his annual conference, then called IMPRO, but he offered to pay all of my expenses to attend. Before the conference, Dr. Juran delivered, “Making Quality Happen,” which remains one of the most informative sessions I’ve ever taken part in about the value of a systems approach to quality management and improvement.
I quoted him in my book, The Baldrige Quality System: “Prior to the Baldrige Award, any company that didn’t have a quality revolution was confused. Quality consultants were tugging them in different directions. We lost a decade that way. The criteria can become the focal point around which the renaissance can be built.”
Dr. Juran’s prediction has not come true—yet. While Baldrige still has the potential to inspire a quality and performance renaissance, it has not gained the traction enjoyed by programs such as Lean and Six Sigma, in part because…
23Jan2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBenefit-to-Cost Ratio for Baldrige: 820-to-1
A new study of the net social value of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program concludes that the program “creates great value for the U.S. economy.”
Economists Albert N. Link from the University of North Carolina and John T. Scott from Dartmouth College published their evaluation of 45 Baldrige Award applicants on December 16, 2011. The report is available here (pdf). The Baldrige program asked the 274 organizations that submitted applications from 2007 to 2010 to participate in the study and 45 accepted the invitation. Link and Scott used a counterfactual evaluation method to determine the benefit-to-cost ratio, asking what the private sector would have had to invest to achieve the same level of benefits through the Baldrige program. Benefits were realized in three areas:
- Savings to the applicants in investment costs to achieve the same level of benefits from their performance excellence strategies as they realized from the Baldrige program
- Gains by consumers in greater satisfaction from higher quality products and services
- Gains to the economy from saving scarce resources because the Baldrige Criteria were available
As I understand it, the counterfactual evaluation case made by the study is that organizations that integrate Baldrige increase demand because they offer higher quality products and services and they reduce costs because of more efficient operations. They earn more and spend less.
Link and Scott describe the methodology in their report. They concluded that the ratio of social benefits to social costs among the 45 organizations that responded to the survey was 351:1 while the ratio for all Baldrige Award…
19Jan2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA Systematic Approach to Change
The decision to do a Baldrige assessment is a decision to change the organization. Questions will be asked that prompt leaders to reconsider the way they do things. Gaps in the day-to-day conduct of business will be exposed. Unacceptable results will shine light on ineffective processes. Cursed with new knowledge, senior leaders can either ignore it and accept that the current management system is unable to achieve the results they desire or embrace change.
The opportunities for improvement revealed by a Baldrige assessment contain the logic for acting upon them: Your results are flat or negative because this or that process is broken. Fix the process and improve your results. Measure your progress. Validate it with your customers. Repeat.
Unfortunately, the logic of the change is usually lost to everyone but the leaders who enact it, which can render it ineffective. In a recent article on Forbes, author Carol Kinsey Goman explains why human beings resist change. According to brain analysis technology, our work habits are controlled by a part of the brain called the basal ganglia. When we do things the way we’ve always done them, we feel good. Change stimulates the prefrontal cortex, which is linked to the amygdala, which controls our “fight or flight” response. When change overwhelms the prefrontal cortex, the amygdale triggers physical and psychological disorientation and pain. Even if we know logically that a change is necessary and positive, our brains can react negatively.
Goman offers six suggestions for helping your workforce handle change:
- Trust people to see the…
Baldrige Is a Continuous Improvement Program
Those leaders who decide to give Baldrige a spin often focus on the obvious step: conducting a Baldrige assessment. Some may apply for a state award or the Baldrige Award, but most do an internal assessment, which identifies strengths and opportunities for improvement. If the assessment is done right and professionally evaluated, the list of opportunities is long—much longer than any organization can address is one year. As a result, too many organizations only conduct that one assessment, thus missing their opportunity to build a world-class management system.
Baldrige Award winners integrate Baldrige by performing regular—usually annual—Baldrige assessments. The process of producing assessments and prioritizing and acting on the opportunities they reveal institutionalizes a culture of continuous improvement. It keeps everyone focused on what is most important for the organization to grow and excel. It improves the alignment of people and processes with the organization’s goals, objectives, and strategies. Best of all, it delivers results, as the award application summaries of Baldrige Award winners show.
IndustryWeek recently reported on a survey it conducted with TBM Consulting about the impact of continuous-improvement programs on three financial metrics: anticipated revenue growth, operating income growth, and cash flow over the past year. “Across the board, companies with no continuous improvement programs performed worse across all three measures,” Jill Jusko concluded here:
- More than 50% of respondents with no continuous improvement program said they expect revenue growth to be 3% or less in 2012, compared to fewer than 20% of companies with mature continuous improvement programs.
- Nearly half of…
Still Passionate about Baldrige
“There is no question that our adherence to the Baldrige performance criteria has made us a much more efficient university, and helped us weather repeated cuts in state aid without affecting educational quality,” write Charles W. Sorensen and Julie Furst-Bowe, chancellor and provost at the University of Wisconsin-Stout (article here).
UW-Stout earned the Baldrige Award in 2001. Ten years later it remains passionate about the value of integrating Baldrige. According to Sorenson and Furst-Bowe, “The most important change brought about by our Baldrige experience, which is now part of our culture, was the establishment of an inclusive planning process to ensure that, in Baldrige speak, ‘all arrows are pointing in the same direction,’ and not at cross-purposes.”
Having worked with five Baldrige Award winners, I can attest to the value of aligning processes and people with the goals, strategies, and objectives of the organization. Whether you are in business, healthcare, or education, the ability to focus all activities on shared goals dramatically improves performance and is a major reason Baldrige Award winners achieve world-class results.
Sorenson and Furst-Bowe also state that “the Baldrige model…also led to a number of important innovations, including our e-Scholar or student laptop program, our designation as Wisconsin’s polytechnic university, and our Discovery Center for applied research and economic development outreach.”
Most organizations embrace Baldrige because they want to improve quality and performance and reduce waste. Few think about being more innovative, but “managing for innovation” is a core value of the Baldrige model. As organizations understand and improve their…
3Jan2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHelp Bootstrap My Baldrige Project
What do world-class hospitals and medical centers do differently? What can the hospitals and medical centers we use learn from them?
To answer these questions, I’ve launched a new project on Kickstarter to research and write a book called The Road to World-Class Healthcare. You can watch a video introducing the project and read a complete description of it here. The key to the book is the research: road trips to 20 to 25 world-class hospitals and medical centers across the country to interview leaders and learn about best practices.
To fund the research, I’ve posted the project on Kickstarter. A Kickstarter project succeeds by gaining backers who pledge financial support in exchange for rewards. Your reward for becoming a backer of The Road to World-Class Healthcare includes exclusive access to audio excerpts of key interviews, photos, and video of best practices. Invest more and the rewards increase. You can find the complete list of rewards here.
One of the reasons for posting this project on Kickstarter, other than to help fund the research, is to see if it can generate interest. If it meets the goal, the book will be written, and that book will appeal to mainstream publishers who expect authors to have a “platform” from which to market and sell their work. Kickstarter will help me build a platform.
Please take a couple minutes to check out the video and project description at Kickstarter here. I hope you will take a personal interest in supporting it. And, since this is a grassroots…
27Dec2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
