All Posts Tagged With: "innovation"
Still Passionate about Baldrige
“There is no question that our adherence to the Baldrige performance criteria has made us a much more efficient university, and helped us weather repeated cuts in state aid without affecting educational quality,” write Charles W. Sorensen and Julie Furst-Bowe, chancellor and provost at the University of Wisconsin-Stout (article here).
UW-Stout earned the Baldrige Award in 2001. Ten years later it remains passionate about the value of integrating Baldrige. According to Sorenson and Furst-Bowe, “The most important change brought about by our Baldrige experience, which is now part of our culture, was the establishment of an inclusive planning process to ensure that, in Baldrige speak, ‘all arrows are pointing in the same direction,’ and not at cross-purposes.”
Having worked with five Baldrige Award winners, I can attest to the value of aligning processes and people with the goals, strategies, and objectives of the organization. Whether you are in business, healthcare, or education, the ability to focus all activities on shared goals dramatically improves performance and is a major reason Baldrige Award winners achieve world-class results.
Sorenson and Furst-Bowe also state that “the Baldrige model…also led to a number of important innovations, including our e-Scholar or student laptop program, our designation as Wisconsin’s polytechnic…
3Jan2012 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA Pathway to Innovation
I worked with MEDRAD on both of its Baldrige Awards. Rose Almon-Martin, vice president of Performance Excellence and Brand, managed those Baldrige application processes. Over the last eight years, she has become a Baldrige examiner and become involved in establishing Pennsylvania’s state award program.
Rose is quoted in “The Baldrige Process: World Standard in Manufacturing Quality Improvement – But Still Relevant?” She compares the resources spent on Baldrige to doing maintenance on a physical plant. “It’s not extra. It’s part of how we do things. What Baldrige does is keep you constantly improving the intangible assets. Since we started using the criteria back in the early ‘90s, we have doubled our revenue per employee.”
The article quotes Andy Tannen, a reputation management expert who wrote in IndustryWeek that “the business press, not to mention the mainstream media, pays little attention to what amounts to the Oscars for business.”
For too many leaders, Baldrige is synonymous with the mundane side of running an organization: process management, measurement, and employee satisfaction. Eric Franks, manager of Technology and Quality Assurance at PRO-TEC, another Baldrige Award winner, explains that the real value of Baldrige is in creating an innovative culture.
“Baldrige helps us drive innovation and incorporate new processes so…
1Jun2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued6 Reasons to Revive US Manufacturing
The impetus for the Baldrige program in the late 1980s was improving manufacturing in the United States. The original criteria reflected a manufacturing mindset that has evolved to fit all types of organizations, but it wasn’t until the third year of the Baldrige Award that a service company, FedEx, won the Award.
Despite its origin in manufacturing, the Award has little appeal for manufacturers today. Only a few manufacturers apply for the Baldrige Award each year while 54 healthcare organizations submitted applications in 2010. Last year, only three manufacturers, among 83 total applicants, applied for the Award, although some of the seven small business applicants may have been manufacturers.
Reviving Baldrige in manufacturing can help revive manufacturing in the U.S. Why is manufacturing so important? Jon Rynn lists six reasons it is central to the economy in an article in new deal 2.0:
- Manufacturing has been the path to development. “From the rise of England in the 19th century, to the rise of the U.S., Germany, Japan and the USSR in the 20th, to the newly industrializing countries like Korea, Taiwan, and now China, manufacturing has been the key to prosperity.”
- Manufacturing is the foundation of global “Great Power.” “About 80% of the world’s production of factory…
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…
26May2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued“Lean-ing” Your Workforce
Building facilities and sending jobs overseas has not abated, but recent articles in business publications like Bloomberg BusinessWeek point out that the pace has slowed as more American companies are deciding to do in the U.S. what they had almost automatically been deciding to do in other countries.
One reason is the cost of labor, which has risen enough in other countries to negate one of the biggest reasons to ship jobs overseas. Another is the threat to supply chains made painfully visible by the recent earthquake in Japan. A third reason is the productivity of American workers, which is largely responsible for the rise in profitability despite recessionary pressures and high unemployment.
One of the key drivers of profitability among American manufacturers has been the implementation of Lean. In an IndustryWeek article available here, author Gregg Gordon says, “Companies that practice Lean rely on their employees who know the process best to identify unproductive activities and replace them with productive ones. This additional productive time results in higher output with the same pace of production using the same capital expenditures.”
Gordon’s analysis explains why profits have soared without noticeable impact on the unemployment rate. In Lean Labor: A Survival Guide for Companies Facing Global…
22May2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedEnemies of Innovation
I don’t drink coffee, but I am intrigued by the new coffee machines that brew a cup from coffee capsules. It sounds like a very profitable razor/razor-blade model: If you can convince people that the coffee machine is the way to go, the company will make a boatload of money on the capsules. I didn’t realize that the idea, first introduced by Nestle with the Nespresso, has been around for more than twenty years.
In “Innovation’s Hidden Enemies” (HBR, April 22, 2011), Alessandro Di Fiore describes what Nestle did to popularize the Nespresso. “As we all know,” he writes, “organizations and cultures rebel against innovations, especially when they are first conceived.” Nespresso became Nestle’s fastest growing new business in the 2000s because its leaders tackled three hidden enemies to innovation:
- Market research. At first, the company marketed the Nespresso to offices, but the Nespresso team believed that the product would appeal to households. The market research didn’t support its belief, suggesting “a perceived consumer value of just 25 Swiss centimes versus a company-wide threshold requirement of 40 centimes.” Failure to reach such a threshold usually dooms a project, but the team made its case to senior leadership, which took a risk by backing the…
Identifying Game Changers
I’m getting ready to offer the next free report about best practices among Baldrige Award winners—it’s about strategy development—and an article on CNNMoney.com caught my eye.
The Baldrige Criteria ask how your strategic planning process identifies potential blind spots and how you address early indications of major shifts in technology. One of the favorite examples of why this is important is the market leader in horse-drawn carriages when the first Model T’s appeared: If you don’t have processes in place to detect disruptive technologies or recognize your blind spots, you expose your organization to irrelevance.
The article in CNNMoney.com, available here, has the potential to change how cell phone service is delivered. The explosion of smartphones has stretched wireless networks to the limit, forcing companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint Nextel to cap data, charge for overages, and raise prices on phones and tablet plans. And mobile data usage is expected to grow 30 times in the next four to five years. The cell towers and antennas that create the networks are large, inefficient, and expensive to maintain, costing the industry $210 billion a year to operate and another $50 billion to upgrade.
It’s a perfect climate for innovation, and that innovation may…
22Mar2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
