All Posts Tagged With: "Business"
How Can We Promote Baldrige?
The Baldrige program announced that 69 organizations have applied for the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The number is down from last year, primarily because of a significant drop in healthcare applicants (54 in 2010, 40 in 2011). The number of education applicants doubled from 7 to 14 while the number of small business applicants dropped from 7 to 2. A total of five businesses larger than 500 employees applied for the Award in both years; only seven businesses, large and small, applied for the 2011 Award.
As the chart shows, the dearth of business applicants is a long-term trend. The Baldrige program can survive by appealing to healthcare and government agencies, both of which are under pressure to get their acts together, but its roots are in business. For the first 13 years of the Baldrige program, only businesses could apply for and win the Award. It wasn’t until 2001 that three educational institutions won it and the first healthcare winner received the Award in 2002.
While a few businesses, especially at the state level, show interest in the Baldrige model, it is almost invisible on the national business stage.
How do we change that? How can we make Baldrige relevant…
15Jun2011 | Steve George | 4 comments | ContinuedStop the Race to the Bottom
Ecolab CEO Doug Baker recently claimed in a StarTribune commentary that Minnesota’s tax rate is “a barrier to attracting and sometimes keeping top talent.” I think that’s baloney.
Let’s say the “top talent” is a single person who earns a taxable income of $150,000 a year, surely at the low end for really top talent. Minnesota taxes currently take $11,775 of that. The Minnesota rate is about the same rate as the states of Wisconsin, New York, and North Carolina, higher than Illinois, North Dakota, and Missouri, and lower than Iowa, California, and Maine.
Baker claims our high personal income taxes are already a barrier, but our rates are not out of line with most other states. The average state tax rate, not counting the states with no state taxes, is around 6 percent for a single earner taxable income of $150,000. One would hope the quality of life in Minnesota—not to mention the opportunity to work at companies like Ecolab, 3M, Cargill, General Mills, Medtronic, Mayo Clinic, Best Buy, and many others—would more than offset the extra couple grand in state taxes the top talent would accrue here. If that was truly a sticking point, I’m guessing Ecolab could bump their…
12Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued6 Reasons to Revive US Manufacturing
The impetus for the Baldrige program in the late 1980s was improving manufacturing in the United States. The original criteria reflected a manufacturing mindset that has evolved to fit all types of organizations, but it wasn’t until the third year of the Baldrige Award that a service company, FedEx, won the Award.
Despite its origin in manufacturing, the Award has little appeal for manufacturers today. Only a few manufacturers apply for the Baldrige Award each year while 54 healthcare organizations submitted applications in 2010. Last year, only three manufacturers, among 83 total applicants, applied for the Award, although some of the seven small business applicants may have been manufacturers.
Reviving Baldrige in manufacturing can help revive manufacturing in the U.S. Why is manufacturing so important? Jon Rynn lists six reasons it is central to the economy in an article in new deal 2.0:
- Manufacturing has been the path to development. “From the rise of England in the 19th century, to the rise of the U.S., Germany, Japan and the USSR in the 20th, to the newly industrializing countries like Korea, Taiwan, and now China, manufacturing has been the key to prosperity.”
- Manufacturing is the foundation of global “Great Power.” “About 80% of the world’s production of factory…
Porter: CSR Is Dead End
In an interview on HBR.org, management expert, author, and Harvard professor Michael Porter said that CSR (corporate social responsibility) is a dead end. “For folks in the CSR world,” he added, “the real impact isn’t on charitable giving but mobilizing the business itself.” (video and article available here)
Porter and partner Mark Kramer argue for a principle they label “shared value, which involves creating economic value in a way that also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges. Businesses must reconnect company success with social progress.” As they see it, “shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success.”
It’s not exactly a catchy name, nor is it a new concept, but if Porter and Kramer can get more companies to focus on the needs and challenges of society—rather than creating a demand for something we don’t really need—they will help CSR move to the next phase.
I would call that next phase corporate social profitability (CSP), since both companies and society benefit.
If you want to know what CSP looks like, consider the case of Dannon yogurt in Bangladesh, which I wrote about here. Danone teamed up with Grameen Bank to develop…
24Mar2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige Benefits the U.S.
“Our country is discussing ways to meet the economic challenges and global competition facing our nation and the necessity to make some concessions to help solve our national debt and deficit problems, and yet we already have a program that benefits the United States by driving economic development through increasing business productivity, workforce efficiency, and job creation.”
Last Friday, E. David Spong, president of the American Society for Quality, past chairman of the board of the Baldrige Foundation, and CEO of two Baldrige Award winners, testified before the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies in support of increasing, not decreasing, funding for the Baldrige program. President Obama has proposed cutting the program’s funding from $9.6 million annually to $7.7 million.
Spong points out that “federal funding is in fact only a small measure of the total amount of hours, funding, and value contributing to the program. Yet government support is significant as it provides the integrity, consistency, and continuity the program needs; and without an efficient and effectively managed program, the entire stakeholder system would collapse.”
To those who think the purpose of the Baldrige program is the Award, Spong argues that “the intention is not to simply give out…
15Mar2011 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedStrategic Value of Corporate Social Responsibility
The evolution of corporate social responsibility from charity to strategy is one of the great business stories of the past decade. The leaders in CSR are finding ways to enter new markets that seemed undesirable and impenetrable. It takes longer, the profit margins are smaller, and the challenges are greater, but the payoff, both for the company and its customers, is huge.
Pamela Hawley describes these benefits in her article on Fast Company about Danone and Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (“Corporate Social Responsibility: How You Can Profit – and Kick Poverty Out,” March 4, 2011). Grameen Bank pretty much invented microfinancing as a way of lending small amounts of money to those who had little, primarily women. Danone makes yogurt.
Danone wanted to enter the Bangladesh market so it partnered with Grameen to create a unique, community-based model. “Those of us who are involved in CSR know we need to have experts on the ground,” Hawley writes. “It’s important to establish local buy-in, which can take years of relationship building. And we need to have experience, or rely on those who do.”
The annual income of a Bangladeshi is $497. The country has one of the highest child and maternal malnutrition rates in the world.…
7Mar2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Are You Looking For?
Baldrige.com now has 500 articles available that provide “the information you need to build the organization you want.” That includes your guide to building the career you want, The Baldrige Edge, available here.
What are you looking for? Here’s a sample of what you can find on Baldrige.com:
Baldrige: What it is, integrating Baldrige, starting points, Baldrige Criteria, Baldrige assessment, Baldrige Award, the organization you want, 10 questions to ask
Leadership: Leaders’ job, leadership matters most, priorities, mission and vision, managing, innovation, building a great organization, sustainability, 5 deadly diseases, change management, 10 critical questions
Planning: First phase of strategic planning, innovation and planning, challenging your assumptions, blind spots, revolutionary thinking, testing strategies, prioritizing initiatives, alignment and integration, plan deployment, 90-day action plans, 10 critical questions
Customers: Who are they, dangerous assumptions, customer knowledge, identifying requirements, engagement, increasing satisfaction, measuring satisfaction, 10 critical questions
Measurement: How do you know that, management by fact, performance measurement, aligning strategies and measures, balanced scorecard, communicating performance, knowledge management, 10 critical questions
Workforce: Valuing employees, driving out fear, identifying requirements, workforce planning, succession planning, employee engagement, communication, diversity, training effectiveness, workforce well-being, 10 critical questions
Process: What’s the process, process thinking, identifying key processes, value creation processes, process matrix, 5 process questions, keys to…
24Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
