All Posts Tagged With: "innovation"
Acknowledging Innovative Excellence – Milliken
The Baldrige Criteria for Excellence ask how you govern and fulfill your societal responsibilities, with specifications regarding reductions in environmental impacts through the use of “green” technology, resource-conserving activities, or improvements in social impacts such as volunteering or charity work. Ethical behavior is also included in this category, with considerations for key processes and measures or indicators of quality ethics. Milliken, a textiles company that was founded in 1865, knows firsthand what it takes to earn a Baldrige Award, as they were recipients back in 1989. Since being granted the Award, Milliken has diversified to a much more expansive organization, which now produces all sorts of different specialty chemicals and textiles, from the fabric that reinforces duct tape, to the products that make mattresses fire resistant, the antimicrobial coatings on countertops, and thousands of other patents.
Milliken takes a unique route when it comes to encouraging innovation from within. The idea began as a method of allowing lab researchers to run with their curiosity until they’d reached a marketable end. Researchers can use 15% of their time to investigate whatever they like, while proven innovators get 50%. Laurie Haughey, Director of Education Services at Milliken, believes that this type of practice will lead the way to breakthrough innovations. Ms Haughney states, “Hourly associates own and are responsible for 90% of the plant’s safety processes and safety education. Everyone’s head counts who adds to the headcount.” This practice helped…
8Mar2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedValuing Workforce Members and Partners
An organization’s success depends increasingly on an engaged workforce that benefits from meaningful work, clear organizational direction, and performance accountability that has a safe, trusting, and cooperative environment. Nestle Purina PetCare, one of the 2010 Baldrige Award winners, are well aware of how an organization does exactly that. A successful organization can capitalize on the diverse backgrounds, knowledge, skills, creativity, and motivation of its workforce and partners. Valuing the people in your workforce means being committed to their engagement, satisfaction, development, and well-being. Increasingly, this involves more flexible, high-performance work practices tailored to varying workplace and home life needs. Major challenges in the area of valuing members of your workforce include the following:
- Demonstrating a leader’s commitment to their success. At Purina, senior leaders communicate the ideals of the company’s founder: the “4 Talls” (Stand Tall, Think Tall, Smile Tall, and Live Tall,) to which they have added a 5th, “We create Tall innovation.”
- Providing recognition that goes beyond the regular compensation system.
- Offering development and progression within your organization.
- Sharing your organization’s knowledge so your workforce can better serve your customers and contribute to achieving your strategic objectives.
- Creating an environment that encourages risk taking and innovation.
- Creating a supportive environment for a diverse workforce. Organizations need to build internal and external partnerships to better accomplish overall goals.
Partnerships with members of your workforce might entail developmental opportunities, cross training, or new work organizations, including high-performance work teams. Internal partnerships also might involve creating network…
27Feb2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedStill 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 university, and our Discovery Center for applied research and economic development outreach.”
Most organizations embrace Baldrige because they want to improve quality and performance and reduce waste. Few think about being more innovative, but “managing for…
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 we can be first to market on these products.”
The article in Area Development Online was written by Dave Claborn, director of Development and Communication Relations at Ohio State University. He answers the question posed by…
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 machinery has been controlled by what we would consider the ‘Great Powers.’ Until the 1950s, the U.S. had produced about 50%; we now produce less than China’s 16%.”
- Manufacturing is the most important cause of economic…
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…
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 Competition, Gordon explains how an organization can use Lean techniques to understand, quantify, and manage labor costs and realize the benefits of Lean in performance management: lower costs, higher quality, and faster cycle times.
Here’s a…
22May2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
