The Secret to Success: Implementation

In my experience, the distinction between Baldrige Award winners and average organizations is not in the creativity of their ideas or the innovation of their processes, but in how they execute them. World-class organizations implement, totally and relentlessly. Average organizations don’t.

Earlier this month, more than 400 creative people gathered in New York to tackle the issue of making ideas happen. Fast Company reported its favorite insights from the 2011 99% Conference (article available here):

One-third of our movies have taken about 7 years to make. Rigorous persistence and uncompromising creative standards are perhaps the most notable features of Pixar’s creative process. As one of the company’s founders put it: “Quality is the best business plan.”

If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business.

Be a sprinter, not a marathon runner. The key to productivity is to recognize the power of renewal and have a finish line. According to Stephen Schwartz, president and CEI of The Energy Project, “We’ve lost our finish lines.”

If you’re not creating waves, then you’re not pushing enough. Pursuing ideas with obvious conclusions won’t create the change we need to see in the world, said Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas.

Make heroes out of failures. Pay attention to the learnings. Reframing key failures as discoveries will help foster an environment of risk taking.

The “OK Plateau” is the point when we turn on autopilot and stop getting better at a certain thing. It is possible to continue to improve at most tasks, but not if we expect it to happen automatically, said Joshua Foer, author of…

The 90-Day Action Plan

One of the contributions of healthcare’s participation in the Baldrige process has been the 90-day action plan, which is now being used by more and more businesses, educational organizations, and nonprofits.

The 90-day action plan is a systematic tool for deploying a strategic plan. Before it came along, organizations often had trouble reviewing performance to plan during the year with the result that initiatives were not completed and goals were not met.

Organizations use the 90-day action plan to break annual goals and objectives into the quarterly actions necessary to achieve them. By reviewing performance on the 90-day plans, senior leaders ensure that actions are on track or they can more quickly intervene to get them on track.

Baptist Hospital, Inc., which received the Baldrige Award in 2003, was one of the first to popularize 90-day action plans. Its award application summary describes the process:

Leader annual goals…are translated into 90-day action plans to facilitate goal accomplishment. 90-day action plans for BHI leaders are formulated or updated each quarter. This process for updating or reevaluating action plans on a quarterly basis enables the organization to be flexible and agile in accomplishing or reassessing longer-term goals and objectives. The 90-day action plan process is the fundamental and fully deployed method used to evaluate progress toward accomplishment of goals and address other strategic issues. Senior officers also maintain 90-day action plans, which are called senior management priorities. At quarterly retreats, the senior officers evaluate progress toward accomplishment of their own goals and formulate changes as appropriate.

The Baptist…