All Posts Tagged With: "core values"
The Vital Few
What one thing does your organization value above all else? Is that clearly communicated?
In most organizations, making things simple is an almost impossible task. There are too many strategies because all of them are important. Action plans abound because they all must be done. Organizational performance measures proliferate because everything is critical.
Dan and Chip Heath, the authors of Made to Stick, argue for simplicity in “Analysis of Paralysis” (FastCompany, November 1, 2007). They describe a research study in which doctors were told of a man with chronic hip pain who had been given drugs to treat his pain but they had been ineffective. The only remaining option was hip replacement surgery, but then one more medication was found. Would the doctors try it or opt for the surgery? Forty-seven percent chose the medication.
Another group of doctors received the same facts except that two new medication options had been found. More options are better, right? Not for the doctors: Only 28% chose to try either medicine. “More options, even good ones, can freeze us,” write the Heaths, “leading us to stick with the ‘default’ plan, which in this case was slicing open someone’s hip. This is clearly not rational behavior, but it…
23Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThink Like Your Buyers
In the 1980s, four out of five American car buyers were loyal to the company that manufactured their brand. I remember growing up in a Chevy family and we had friends who were Ford people and we were as loyal to our car brand as we were to our religion.
In 2009, only one in five Americans was loyal to the same car brand.
In “The Manufacturer’s World Has Changed Forever” (IndustryWeek, July 14, 2010), Robert Bloom provides this contrast in customer loyalty to point out that the purchasing behavior of customers has changed, which is old news to any company that’s managed to keep its head above water the last two years, but his case study is interesting. Italy’s Fiat Auto reported a net loss of nearly two billion euros in 2002 and experts thought it would not survive. In 2008, it reported a trading profit of more than 1.1 billion euros—a three billion euro turnaround in six years.
How did Fiat Auto do it? Bloom lists several key actions:
- Terminated a failing venture with General Motors to gain full decision-making autonomy
- Eliminated an entire floor of executives to reduce costs and bureaucracy
- Cut Fiat’s product development time in half to get products to market quickly
- Reorganized…
Fixing the Financial System
How does your organization review and achieve accountability for management’s actions? For fiscal accountability? For transparency in your operations? For protection of stakeholder and stockholder interests?
If every financial institution in the U.S. had been forced to answer these Baldrige questions honestly and accurately in the past few years, and if regulators had been verifying their responses, the financial crisis and the bailout it triggered could have been averted. Either they would have had processes in place to deliver ethical and effective leadership or their irresponsible practices would have been exposed.
“I think the last two years have revealed the single largest failure of senior management in the financial sector, and of the board system in American history,” wrote Bo Cutter in new deal 2.0 (November 24, 2009). Cutter has been a managing director of Warburg Pincus, a global private equity firm, and led President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget transition team. Considering the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s and 1990s and the scandals involving Enron and Worldcomm earlier this decade, one could argue that senior management and boards of directors in the financial sector have been failing miserably for thirty years. One could also make the case that the…
4Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedKEYSTONE: Organizational Learning
Learning is a keystone in the Baldrige Criteria. Organizational and personal learning is one of 11 Baldrige core values, and learning is one of four factors used to evaluate every process. According to the Criteria, “learning refers to:
- refining your approach through cycles of evaluation and improvement
- encouraging breakthrough change to your approach through innovation
- sharing refinements and innovations with other relevant work units and processes in your organization”
Plan-Do-Check-Act is a learning cycle. Organizations in which PDCA is a natural part of how they do things are learning organizations. “Organizations that have acquired the learning habit are endlessly seeking new methods or new products, forever testing and then reflecting, consciously or unconsciously pushing round that wheel,” wrote Charles Handy in Learning Organizations (Sarita Chawla and John Renesch, 1995).
Creating a learning organization means creating a climate in which learning is encouraged, assisted, applauded, and rewarded. It also means engaging employees in the learning process. Peter Senge, one of the gurus of systems thinking and learning organizations, wrote in his seminal book, The Fifth Discipline, “People learn most rapidly when they have a genuine sense of responsibility for their actions. Helplessness, the belief that we cannot influence the circumstances under which we live, undermines the incentive…
19Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedIf you are new to Baldrige…
…and you want to know:
- what Baldrige is, click here
- what to tell your boss about Baldrige, click here
- what the Baldrige Criteria are, click here
- the core values embedded in the Criteria, click here
- the structure of the Criteria, click here
25 “Moonshots for Management”
Last year the Management Lab, with support from McKinsey & Company, assembled 35 management experts to discuss what management practices imperiled the long-term success of large organizations and what fundamental changes are needed in management principles, processes, and practices.
Gary Hamel, author of two leading books on business strategy, described three broadly-shared beliefs among the participants in the Harvard Business Review:
- “Management” is one of our most important social technologies.
- The management model of the last 100 years is out of date.
- We must reinvent management to make large organizations more adaptable, innovative, and inspiring places to work.
The Baldrige model can help any organization of any size reinvent its management system by identifying, prioritizing, and acting on the major gaps in that system. I believe Baldrige provides a systems perspective and sound guidance on achieving the 25 “moonshots for management” that the experts proposed:
- Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. The first question in the Baldrige Criteria is: “How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values?” The Criteria then ask how senior leaders deploy them and how their personal actions support them.
- Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. Criteria Item 1.2 asks how the organization fulfills its societal responsibilities and…
Core Value: Management by Fact
If you were to pick one basic of performance excellence at which most organizations stink, it would have to be management by fact. I remember Curt Reimann, former head of the Baldrige program, saying that the measurement Category consistently produced the weakest responses. We think we know what’s going on, but when you look for facts to support our thinking, you often come up empty.
Peter Senge called this a “leap of abstraction.” “Leaps of abstraction occur when we move from direct observations to generalizations without testing,” he wrote in The Fifth Discipline (Broadway Business, 2006). You are making a leap of abstraction if:
- You assume you know exactly what your customers require but have never formally asked them or checked your assumptions with them
- You make the same assumptions about your employees
- You fix a problem without identifying the source of the problem or measuring the process
- You blame people for mistakes without understanding the system or measuring the process
- You develop a strategy with little knowledge of competitors, the market, risks, or internal capabilities
- You grab a popular new program in the hope that it might turn your organization around
Most leaders and managers are so used to mistaking leaps of abstraction for truth that they feel…
17Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
