All Posts Tagged With: "management system"
Making Change Happen
This is a guest article by Arnie Weimerksirch. If you want to contribute an article to Baldrige.com, check out the guidelines here.
Change is difficult. In our personal lives we struggle to break bad habits, eat a healthier diet, or get more exercise. In spite of our good intentions, we often fail.
Organizations also find it difficult to change: Studies show that almost 85% of change initiatives fail. Even when faced with a crisis, many organizations are not able to make the changes necessary to survive. As W. Edwards Deming said, “Survival is not mandatory; it is purely optional.”
In 2004, on the 50th anniversary of the Fortune 500 list, only 71 of the original 500 remained on the list. Not all of them failed, of course, but the majority did. And they failed because they were not able to change with the times.
Why is change so difficult and what is the answer? One of the main reasons transformation initiatives fail is our love of management fads. In her book, Fad Surfing in the Boardroom, Eileen Shapiro defines fad surfing as “the practice of riding the crest of the latest management panacea and then paddling out again just in time to ride the next…
8Feb2010 | admin | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise
When you’re doing Baldrige, it’s easy to get immersed in fixing the problems with your management system, which is good as long as you also keep looking outside your organization to see if adopting a new system should get as much attention as improving the old one.
For example, Padmasree Warrior wrote on Cisco’s blog (click here) about the Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise (NGCE), which is a very different type of management system. Here’s how she describes it:
Priorities are set by clusters of experts that make decisions. Decisions are communicated real-time through social media applications. Work is shared on a secure collaboration technology platform. Individuals are able to apply themselves to the work based on their skills and availability, regardless of their geographic location. Expertise outside the Enterprise is included ‘on-demand’ to bring necessary knowledge to bear. Funding is directed based on milestones. Direct accountability is embedded into the social network. Finally, organizational functions become less relevant and ‘Re-orgs’ become obsolete. Leadership is defined as the ability to influence, envision, and execute―rather than the authority to command and control.
Despite its innovative design, NGCEs must still address the components of a management system addressed by the Baldrige Criteria, which Warrior lists as “strategy and planning, delivering value to customers and partners, human capital, innovation and design, manufacturing and distribution, marketing, and messaging.”
28Jan2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Case Against Incentives
The tenth of W. Edwards Deming’s 14 points is to “eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.” In other words, incentive pay is bad.
In “The Dark Side of Incentives” (BusinessWeek, November 12, 2009), Barry Schwartz concurs: “The inescapable flaw in incentives, as 35 years of research shows, is that they get you exactly what you pay for, but it never turns out to be what you want.”
You need look no further than the incentive practices of our large banks to see the truth in these statements. Pay bonuses for short-term results without any regulator on how those results are achieved and you will get the results you want, but at what cost?
Deming reminds us that low quality and low productivity—in fact, 80-90% of all problems an organization faces—are problems with the system. Since management controls the management system, 80-90% of all problems are management problems that the workforce is not in a position to resolve.
Not only are incentives an…
16Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Management Sites Do You Like?
(Other than Baldrige.com, of course.)
I scour the Internet daily to find sites that illuminate the Baldrige model or any element in it. Harvard Business and Fast Company are two favorites. Occasionally, I find interesting posts or articles on other sites, but the pickings tend to be slim.
Most organizational systems-related sites (there’s just not an easy way to say that) are selling something. That doesn’t mean they don’t have valuable information to offer, but it’s usually presented in the context of the company’s products or services. Sites that aren’t selling something tend to be narrowly focused on one element of a management system, i.e., leadership or human resources or customer relationships, and on the nitty-gritty of those elements rather than the big picture.
I’m looking for the systems perspective laid out by the Baldrige Criteria and captured in the categories on Baldrige.com. If you have an organizational systems-related site to recommend, or a site that focuses on one part of that system with a big-picture perspective, please share its Web address by submitting it in a comment at the end of this article or emailing it to me here. Tell me why you like it.
It may even make our soon-to-be-updated Blogroll.
…
13Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedManagement System Innovation
Where should you promote innovation first?
The authors of a recent McKinsey article, “Innovation: What’s Your Score?” argue for a new way to measure innovation to get an innovation performance score. Although developing such a measure may take more time than most companies want to spend, the authors’ research revealed four insights that were true for all industries:
- Strong innovators do consistently well, mostly by outperforming the markets they are already in rather an entering or creating new ones.
- Top innovators continue to outperform their competitors during the tough times. Their agility—a Baldrige core value—helps them cope with the challenges.
- There may be an optimum level of innovation. The lowest innovation performance always suffers but the highest isn’t always rewarded proportional to its position.
- Business model innovation, as opposed to product and process innovation, “seems to be necessary for superior innovation impact.” They define business model innovation as “the creation of substantial new value for customers and the firm by creatively changing one or more dimensions of the business system.”
That’s what the Baldrige process is all about: understanding what is valuable to customers and transforming your management system to deliver it. As this research shows, building an innovative management system turns out to be at…
8Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued5 Powerful Process Questions
Organizations new to process thinking—and there are a lot of them, even in healthcare and education, which you would expect to be more process oriented because of the continuum of care and educating students for nearly two decades, but are decidedly not—welcome new tools that will help them make the transition from a functional, silo mentality to process thinking.
Here is an approach that any type of organization can use. It is part of a system of process management and continuous improvement in place at Brevard Public Schools (BPS), a large public school district that received Florida’s 2007 Governor’s Sterling Award and is in the running for this year’s Baldrige Award. The system asks and answers simple but powerful questions:
- What do you do and what needs are you meeting? (Process name and description)
- How do you do it? (Process flow chart)
- How do you know you are doing a good job? (Status of outcome measures)
- How do you monitor the process to ensure you meet or exceed customer requirements? (Status of in-process or predictor measures)
- How do you improve? (PDCA, DMAIC, and by-the-numbers)
To make sure these questions are systematically and effectively addressed, BPS trained its senior staff, district leadership, and functional managers in 2006 and 2007 and then trained its principals…
21Aug2009 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued
