All Posts Tagged With: "emergency preparedness"
10 Critical Questions: Data, Information & Knowledge
You manage what you measure, which is why, for decades, leaders managed their companies’ financial performance: They reviewed financial data regularly and other types of data sporadically if at all.
Category 4 in the Baldrige Criteria asks how you measure organizational performance, which for most organizations involves some type of balanced scorecard. It asks how you analyze and review performance and how that leads to performance improvement. And it asks how you manage your information, organizational knowledge, and information technology.
As we noted, the best way to evaluate your measurement system—and your management system—is through a Baldrige assessment using the Baldrige Criteria. You can find out how to do that here.
The Criteria consist of powerful questions, rarely asked, about how an organization functions. If you cannot do a full assessment but want insight into how to improve your measurement system, here are 10 critical questions to ask and answer:
- How do you select and collect the data and information you use to track (1) daily operations and (2) overall organizational performance, and how do you align and integrate these data?
- What are your key organizational performance measures?
- How do you select and use comparative data and information to provide benchmarks for these measures and to…
External Scan: Climate Change
“Companies need to think about how a changing climate affects things such as heating and cooling needs, water availability, and emergency preparedness for catastrophic weather,” write Marshall Chase and Ryan Schuchard of BSR, a global corporate responsibility consultant, for GreenBiz.com. That single statement speaks to several areas in the Baldrige Criteria:
- 1.1a3: How senior leaders create a sustainable organization
- 1.2c1: How you consider the well-being of environmental systems to which your organization does or may contribute
- 2.1a1: How your strategic planning process identifies potential blind spots
- 2.1a2: How strategic planning addresses early indications of shifts in technology, markets, products, and customer preferences
- 2.1a2: How strategic planning addresses long-term organizational sustainability
- 6.1c: How you ensure work system and workplace preparedness for disasters or emergencies including prevention and continuity of operations
Chase and Schuchard touch on several areas that climate change will—indeed, already is—affecting, including:
- Engaging your organization’s entire value chain in identifying and addressing risks and opportunities
- Focusing on your supply chain, which often has a carbon footprint equal to or greater than that of your organization. “BSR has worked closely with food-processing companies and retailers whose supply chain emissions are more than three times larger than those represented by their own facilities and purchased energy.”
- Considering the impact when customers…
