All Posts Tagged With: "customers"
What 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 process improvement, lean, 10 critical questions
Results: Financial, quality, workforce, customer, interpreting results, 10 critical questions
Business: Small business fundamentals, critical capabilities, managing complexity, sharing the wealth, 3 innovation processes, staying on top, corporate citizenship, triple bottom…
24Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBecome a Strategic Performer
The first issue of The Baldrige Edge in Action is now available for those who order The Baldrige Edge. You can learn more about and order your copy of this 61-page guide to securing your job, making it better, and advancing your career by clicking here. The Baldrige Edge works for everyone who wants to become a strategic performer. It covers three smart questions you can use to set yourself apart, 10 steps to becoming a process master, how to take charge of your job and your career, what world-class performance looks like, and much more. It costs $17 and comes with a money-back guarantee.
The first issue of The Baldrige Edge in Action newsletter explores three areas introduced in the guide: measurement, process management, and Baldrige assessments:
- “Attributes of a Good Measure” digs into the elements of an effective measure: relevance, current performance, trends, context, and issues.
- “Common or Special?” looks at the causes of variation in a process, how you can tell them apart, and what you can do about them to improve the process.
- “Baldrige Assessment Pitfalls” describes eight things to avoid when you are conducting a Baldrige assessment, whether for internal use or to apply for a state award or the Baldrige Award.
Order The Baldrige Edge today by clicking here and the guide and first issue of the newsletter will be delivered to your email address.
To read more about the three smart questions, click on these articles:
23Feb2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSmart Question #3: Who Are Our Customers and What Do They Require?
(This excerpt is from The Baldrige Edge, an e-Guide from Baldrige.com. You can learn more about the guide by clicking on the black-and-red box on the right.)
Your organization exists to serve people, as does your department and your work group. Without customers, external and internal, you don’t have a job. Without satisfied, even delighted, customers, your job—and your organization—may be in danger.
In the course of a day’s work, it’s easy for the customer to disappear from the discussion, and that is an opportunity for you. We’ve already talked about process thinking (Smart Question #1) and the fact that everything you do, and everything your group, team, or department does, is part of one or more processes. The final step in each process is the delivery of something to the customers of that process. I’ll give you a few examples:
- You deliver end-of-the-month financial results to leadership. The leaders are the customers of this reporting process.
- You deliver training to employees. The employees are your customers, as are the leaders responsible for developing your workforce.
- You deliver products to customers through distributors. Both the end users of your products and the distributors are your customers.
- You deliver information to people who contact your call center, so they’re your customers, right? Absolutely—but you may also have other customers such as leaders who expect you to meet certain performance levels and internal departments that want to know why people are calling.
Part of…
2Feb2011 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Local Impact of Global Markets
The biggest and fastest-growing markets for almost everything lie in China, India, Brazil, and other emerging markets. It doesn’t matter whether you or your organization sells to these markets: They directly affect your business.
An obvious impact has been on jobs. It’s not just that American manufacturers have been moving production out of the country, but the jobs that have been lost often paid more than what displaced workers are left with. People in other countries who work for a fraction of what American workers make directly affect what American workers make.
Another impact, described recently in The Economist, is on the medical device market. (“Life should be cheap,” January 20, 2011) Innovators in China and India must, of necessity, develop products that are significantly cheaper than their Western equivalents to serve the “bottom of the pyramid,” the four billion people who live on less than $2 a day. As the article notes, “They create products that are stripped to their essentials: scanners that cost $10,000 rather than $100,000; portable electrocardiographs that cost $500 instead of $5,000.”
American medical device manufacturers struggle to compete in these markets, which is why many are investing in research centers and factories in China and India, “developing frugal inventions of their own, which they gleefully sell both locally and in other emerging markets.”
But not back here in the U.S.
The Economist attributes this to two factors: (1) health care is not an efficient market in…
25Jan2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMeaningful Innovation
One of the great strengths of the Baldrige model is that it starts at the beginning. How do you set your mission and vision? How do you determine what your strategic plan should address? How do you identify your key customer groups and markets? How do you know what motivates your employees? How do you design your work processes?
These are foundational questions: If you don’t have rock-solid answers for them, everything that follows will be shaky.
The same is true for innovation. The most innovative organizations start at the beginning with a rock-solid understanding of customer wants and needs, organizational capabilities, and transformational trends that could disrupt their markets and give them a competitive advantage.
The transformational potential of innovation is the subject of “On Tracking Transformational Trends” by Scott Anthony (HBR, January 17, 2011). From his experience, he identifies three areas to assess whether a trend is or is not transformation, using the iPod and 3-D television as examples:
- Market fit. The innovation makes is easier and simpler to do what people are already doing. The iPod provides music on the go. The 3-D television prioritizes something that wasn’t that important. “Do people really want to make the effort to watch 3-D television?”
- Performance. “Strategically sacrifices raw performance in the name of simplicity or affordability.” The iPod deliver lower fidelity but greater convenience, but the 3-D television offers no performance compromises.
- Innovation focus. The innovation is not limited to the…
Baldrige Embraces Social Media
The 2011 Baldrige Criteria give a shout-out to social media with a new question added to the Customer Focus category: “How do you use social media and Web-based technologies to listen to customers, as appropriate?”
A lot of organizations will hide behind that “as appropriate” qualifier, arguing that social media has nothing to do with them. According to David Armano (“Six Social Media Trends for 2011,” HBR, December 6, 2010), a global survey indicates that only 29% of companies have a social media policy. That puts 71% well behind the curve.
Everybody uses Google, right? Last year, Facebook had more weekly site traffic than Google. And it’s not like even the most Luddite of companies ignores social media all together: Some surveys report that 95% of companies use LinkedIn for recruiting.
So it’s not just about using social media and Web-based technologies to listen to customers, as the Baldrige question addresses, but how you use them to acquire and keep customers. With that in mind, here are Armano’s six social media trends for 2011:
- It’s the Integration Economy, Stupid. The challenge is to integrate social media into all facets of business from marketing to crisis management and beyond.
- Tablet & Mobile Wars Create Ubiquitous Social Computing. Cheaper, smarter phones and tablets will move technology consumers closer to being connected 24/7, and in more powerful ways.
- Facebook Interrupts Location-Based Networking. Facebook is about to roll out a location-based service that promises to make location-based networking…
Firms of Endearment
That’s the title of a 2007 book by Rajendra Sisodia, David Wolfe, and Jagdish Sheth. By their definition, a firm of endearment (FoE) “is a company that endears itself to stakeholders by bringing the interests of all stakeholder groups into strategic alignment.” The authors identified FoEs and tracked their stock performance over the previous ten years: The publicly-traded FoEs returned 750% over that time while the S&P returned 128%. In the latest five years, the FoEs returned 205% while the S&P lost 13%. As the authors note with the first sentence in the first chapter: “This book is not about corporate social responsibility. It is about sound business management.”
Creating and balancing value for all stakeholders is a Baldrige expectation. It requires identifying your key stakeholder groups, understanding each group’s key requirements, and developing strategies and plans that meet and exceed the requirements of all stakeholder groups.
“Stakeholders are part of a complex network of interests that function in a matrix of interdependencies,” the FoE authors write. “We argue that each stakeholder tends to thrive best when all stakeholders thrive. No stakeholder group is more important than any other. To see matters otherwise is like saying the heart is more important than the lungs. Life depends on both being healthy. It is disciplined dedication to the well-being of all stakeholders that separates firms of endearment from their competition.”
The book is organized around five major stakeholder groups: customers,…
9Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
