America Needs Baldrige

We want to raise awareness among our elected representatives in Washington about the value of the Baldrige program. On Thursday, September 8^th, Baldrige supporters are being asked to email, fax, and/or call their Senators and Congressmen/ Congresswomen to tell them that “America Needs Baldrige.”

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve posted articles about the results achieved by Baldrige organizations. They provide compelling evidence of the value of the program:

• A study by the European Foundation for Quality Management of 120 Award-winning companies, including 24 from the U.S., compared their financial performance to that of similar companies that had not won awards. Five years after receiving their awards, these companies outperformed the comparison companies by 77% in sales, 44% in assets, and 18% in operating income.
• Cargill has an internal Baldrige assessment process. The cumulative earnings after tax vs. budget of business units that have a high degree of deployment of the Baldrige model is 30% compared to 13% for those with partial deployment and -12% for those just starting the Baldrige journey.
• The five two-time Baldrige Award winners grew significantly between their first and second Awards: 67% in number of sites; 63% in jobs; and 93% in revenue

This Thursday, please take a few…

Stop 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…

The Organization You Want

What information do you need to build the organization you want?

We’ve been answering that question now for one year with nearly 370 articles on all aspects of a world-class management system. Our guide for what to address is the Baldrige model defined by the Baldrige Criteria and used to determine Baldrige Award winners. No other management model in the world has been as thoroughly tested, refined, and deployed.

The goal of any management system is to produce the results you want your organization to achieve. Ideally, those results align with your organization’s mission and vision. In world-class organizations, results are multi-dimensional and not just profits for a business or test results for a school. The Baldrige Criteria identify six areas where excellent results are necessary for long-term success.

The rest of the Baldrige Criteria address the development and deployment of the systematic processes needed to achieve world-class results. The Baldrige model is a process model: It asks how you do what you do more than 130 times.

Process has four dimensions:

• The approach you use to get something done
• Consistent deployment of the approach to all relevant areas of the organization
• Refining the approach through cycles of learning
• The integration of your approach with the rest of your management system

Questions…

83 Vie for 2010 Baldrige Award

The Baldrige program reported yesterday that 83 organizations have applied for the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The breakdown of applicant categories is 54 in health care, 10 in education, 7 in nonprofit/government, 7 small businesses, 3 manufacturers, and 2 service companies.

As the graph shows, last year the health care category accounted for 60% of all applicants. This year it represents 65%. While health care is embracing the Baldrige model, businesses are snubbing it: Only 14.5% of the applicants came from the three business categories, down from 15.7% last year. The Baldrige program came into existence to make American businesses more competitive. While it got business leaders’ attention during its first decade, it has fallen off their radars over the last ten years. It’s hard to imagine the Baldrige program could have survived if it had not added the health care category.

So what will it take to get business leaders to consider the Baldrige model? Or is the program’s inability to market its product too complete to overcome?

To read more about the Baldrige Award, click on these articles:

• What Is Baldrige?
• How the Baldrige Award Works
• Baldrige 101
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• Baldrige Gets Results
• A Baldrige Leader
• Summaries of 2009 Baldrige Award Winning Applications

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