Two of the key elements in a world-class organization, as defined by the Baldrige model, are innovation and communication. In “Eight Communication Traps That Foil Innovation” (HBR, January 12, 2011), Georgia Everse, who was the chief communications officer for Steelcase, argues that innovative ideas, initiatives, and products need smart communications to succeed. She proposes eight traps to avoid as you innovate. Here’s the positive action you can take to avoid those traps:

1. Link innovation to your mission and vision. Projects are more likely to succeed if they support your organization’s reason for being.
2. Make your thinking visible. Create a space where project teams can post charters, objectives, process diagrams, measurement trends, prototyping efforts, etc. to help teams stay on track, reinforce their goals, and bring new stakeholder quickly up to speed.
3. Follow well-defined innovation processes. Develop and refine innovation processes to ensure consistent progress and results.
4. Follow well-defined communication processes. Don’t wait until the team is ready to hand the innovation off for production or marketing or integrating it into your culture. Communicate from the start the opportunities, the options being explored, progress on the project, and your innovative solutions.
5. Bring the future to life. “Tell stories and create experiences that put [internal stakeholders] in the role of the customer, where they can touch and feel a prototype of the new product or service.”
6. Share insights into customer wants and needs. “The best ideas are born out of a discovery process that unveils insights into the behavior patterns of people.” Those insights are valuable to other parts of your organization, too.
7. Build a common language. Be careful to avoid jargon that your team understands but that other parts of the organization—and critical stakeholders—may not.
8. Link innovation to your brand strategy. “Develop a brand-audit tool and use it early in your process. This will guide decision-making and only allow initiatives that meet certain brand criteria to be approved for further development.”

To read more about innovation and communication, click on these articles:

• Managing for Innovation
• Revolutionary Thinking
• When Innovation and Planning Collide
• 10 Healthcare Innovations
• What People Need to Hear
• Be Prepared
• Effective Employee Communication

I’ve written four books on the Baldrige model and worked with five Baldrige Award winners and with Baldrige experts in dozens of organizations. I’ve studied how they think and act and have discovered the secrets that transform them from plodders to strategic performers.

Right here, right now, you can secure your job…make it better…and advance your career with The Baldrige Edge.

Whether you are an employee, manager, or leader, there are two ways to look at achieving your goals at work. You can either think like a short-term plodder and believe that your organization will recognize your talents and hard work and reward you…eventually…maybe… OR you can start acting like a strategic performer, knowing that you will get ahead by taking charge of your job and your career. As a strategic performer, you ask the right questions. You provide insightful answers. You stop wasting your days on the same old drudgery, reacting to the latest problems or the newest crisis, and you see the big picture. You understand where you can make the greatest difference and you seize that opportunity and your job becomes richer, more fulfilling, more fun, and more rewarding.

The beliefs that create success are consistent with the way a strategic performer thinks:

• Ask intelligent questions
• Work on what’s important
• Become a process master
• Take control of your future

If you’re willing to start transforming yourself into a strategic performer today… If you’re willing right now to put aside the plodder’s habits of keeping your head down, doing only what you’re told, waiting for somebody to recognize your value, and wishing for the weekend… If you’re willing to create your dream job with simple, proven steps that will secure your position, make your job better, and advance your career, then you will want to give yourself The Baldrige Edge.

The Baldrige Edge is your guide to getting the job you want and deserve. It works for everyone who wants to become a strategic performer, with special sections for managers and leaders. If you’re a manager or a leader, these sections will help you build world-class departments and organizations. If you’re not a manager or leader, these special sections will help you “manage up” and position you to become an effective leader down the road.

The core of the guide is a new way of approaching your job that I call “Baldrige thinking.” Apply Baldrige thinking and you will have an edge in your job, your department, and your organization… And you will enjoy more interesting and fulfilling work.

Here’s a quick look at the key takeaways in The Baldrige Edge:

• How to use three intelligent questions to become a strategic performer right now
• How to figure out where your organization is going and what that means to you
• How to become a process master
• How to use measurement to drive improvement
• How to take charge of your job and your career
• How to get more out of your group
• How to use the Deming Question to work smarter
• What world-class performance looks like—and how you can achieve it

This quick, easy-to-read guide explains how you can use Baldrige thinking to become a strategic performer starting today. Organizations need plodders because they have jobs that need to be done… But they value performers who do their jobs right, understand what’s going on around them, and help make their group and their organization better.

But that’s not the best part… And it’s not the reason people get The Baldrige Edge. The real reason is that it makes your job better: More interesting…more rewarding…and more fun, without making you do more work. (In fact, you’ll work more efficiently…not as hard and more effectively…with The Baldrige Edge.)

Chances are very good that you will be the first—if not the only—person in your organization to take advantage of The Baldrige Edge. That gives you a huge advantage. And there’s no risk. If you’re not completely satisfied with the guide, I will refund 100% of your money.

I’ve seen the power of The Baldrige Edge to create strategic performers and great organizations and I want you and your organization to have that power. We all benefit when we build better organizations. I want to get The Baldrige Edge out to as many potential performers as possible, which is why you can discover the secrets of Baldrige thinking today for the low price of $5!

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Sutton disagrees, arguing that such a distinction produces leaders with big, vague ideas that can have little to do with reality or can be nearly impossible to implement. It isolates leaders from reality, giving them a reason “to avoid the hard work of learning about the people that they lead, the technologies their companies use, and the customers they serve.”

The Baldrige Criteria does not make this distinction. The first Category in the Criteria asks a number of questions about how senior leaders lead and manage:

• How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values? (Lead)
• How do senior leaders personally promote an organizational environment that fosters, requires, and results in legal and ethical behavior? (Lead)
• How do senior leaders create a sustainable organization? (Lead)
• How do senior leaders create an environment for organizational performance improvement, innovation, and agility? (Lead)
• How do senior leaders communicate with and engage the entire workforce? (Manage)
• How do senior leaders encourage frank, two-way communication throughout the organization? (Manage)
• How do they take an active role in reward and recognition programs? (Manage)
• How do senior leaders focus on creating and balancing value for customers and other stakeholders? (Manage)

As you can see from this list, the distinction between leadership and management is blurred. Creating a sustainable organization is not just an exercise in strategic planning: It requires knowledge of customers, markets, employees, competitors, capabilities, and other factors that can only be acquired by being responsible for the processes that produce such knowledge. It requires management.

The most effective leaders are also effective managers, working with the people, technologies, and processes that will get their organizations where they need to go. They dream, but they also do, and the doing grounds them in the reality of the challenges and opportunities before them.

To read more about effective leadership, click on these articles:

• What Great Organizations Achieve
• Leadership Matters Most
• Seeking Authentic Leaders
• Undercover and Out of Touch
• Management’s Five Deadly Diseases
• A Leader’s Job

John Friel, former president and CEO of Baldrige Award-winner Medrad and the man responsible for leading the metamorphosis of its management system, answered that question for himself in 1989 when he visited Milliken, a textile manufacturer that had won the Baldrige Award the previous year. “They talked about two things that struck me,” said Friel. “They were the market share leader, charging the highest prices and getting the highest margins in the industry, and they had the highest customer satisfaction and retention. That’s when I was converted.”

Milliken’s second point put the responsibility to act on Friel’s doorstep. “They told everyone to stand on a chair and yell at the top of their lungs, ‘Management is the problem!’”

When Friel took over as Medrad’s CEO in 1998, he solved that problem by committing Medrad to annual Baldrige applications. The results came quickly. The company’s revenue started growing at 15% a year. It increased operating income as a percent of revenue, a measure of profitability, from 16 percent in 1999 to 20 percent in 2002. Its percent of “very satisfied” customers exceeded 70, with more than 80% very satisfied with its service. Employee satisfaction exceeded the best-in-class industry benchmark. In a national survey of 57 medical imaging companies, Medrad ranked second. None of its direct competitors finished in the top 20.

A management system consists of interrelated parts. Medrad’s approaches deliver the results described above, but what makes it the industry leader is how it manages the system in which those parts operate. Each element in the system serves Medrad’s mission and vision and not its own self-centered agenda. The synergy of this systems approach produces the company’s outstanding performance.

If you want to move your organization from the rutted path of mediocrity to the road to greatness, you must whip your management system into shape.

To read more about great organizations, click on these articles:

• Small Wonder
• A Healthcare Innovator
• A Healthcare Role Model
• Great, Not Perfect
• Why Baldrige? Saint Luke’s Makes the Case
• Baldrige and K-12: Not for the Faint-Hearted

Art Petty reminds us that Deming remains very relevant on his blog, Management Excellence (click here). He links to a 15-minute video in which Deming describes management’s five deadly diseases (click here for video). Despite Deming’s strange speaking style, the video is interesting because he forcefully makes his case against management problems he had identified during decades of work with all types of organizations.

The five deadly diseases are:

• Lack of constancy of purpose. People haven’t decided what business they are in and as a result, they are unable to plan for the future.

• Emphasis on short-term problems—also known as worshiping the quarterly dividend. Leaders have no plan to stay in business by improving the quality of their products and services. Such short-term thinking produces unemployment, which is a sign of bad management, which means there’s a whole lot of bad management still going on in this country today.

• Annual rating of performance. It’s an arbitrary and unjust system that annihilates long-term planning and teamwork. People work in fear. As Deming said, rewarding performance sounds great but it can’t be done.

• Mobility of management. It takes a long time to understand how a company works. Annual performance ratings encourage management mobility, which leaves too few people who really understand a company’s problems.

• Use of visible figures only. Deming talks about unknown and unknowable figures, like how much business a happy customer does or the multiplying effect of an unhappy customer. We’re teaching the use of visible figures, not transformation.

“When you think of all the underuse, abuse, and misuse of the people of this country, this may be the world’s most underdeveloped nation,” Deming says. “It’s about time for American management to wake up.”

The interview was done in 1984. It could have been done in 2010.

To read more about how to lead, click on these articles:

• Making Change Happen
• The Priorities of Leadership
• Why Organizations Fail
• A Leader’s Job
• What Makes a Good Manager?
• 10 Critical Questions: Senior Leadership

“A good manager is someone with a facility for analysis and an even greater talent for synthesis; someone who has an eye both for the details and for the one big thing that really matters; someone who is able to reflect on facts in a disinterested way, who is always dissatisfied with pat answers and the conventional wisdom, and who therefore takes a certain pleasure in knowledge itself; someone with a wide knowledge of the world and an even better knowledge of the way people work; someone who knows how to treat people with respect; someone with honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and the other things that make up character; someone, in short, who understands oneself and the world around us well enough to know how to make it better. By this definition, of course, a good manager is nothing more or less than a good and well-educated person.”

A former management consultant, Stewart questions the value of a business school education and the validity of management consultant’s theories in helping leaders and their organizations succeed. While he takes dead aim at such luminaries as Taylor, Drucker, and Peters, he ignores gurus like Juran and Deming who helped define total quality management and, through their work, the Baldrige model. The difference, it seems, is that Juran and Deming stuck to what the data and information told them worked while the others presented grand theories as inimitable truths that every organization should embrace.

Either that, or Juran and Deming escaped Stewart’s scrutiny because they lacked the notoriety of Taylor, Drucker, and Peters.

It doesn’t matter what you do or how big or small you are, integrating the Baldrige model will make you a better organization. I’ve worked on Baldrige with medical centers, a K-12 school, a college and a university, a Wing Command of the National Guard and an Army base, a district court, a large market research company and a small one, a pharmaceutical company, medical device manufacturers and a computer manufacturer, a transport refrigeration manufacturer, a dental products manufacturer and dental insurers, printed circuit board manufacturers and a power supply manufacturer, and a gas and electric utility. Baldrige helped all of them improve performance.

But.

These organizations wanted to improve. Your organization may not. Baldrige is definitely right for your organization if you can answer these questions “yes”:

• Do senior leaders believe change is necessary?
• Will they support transforming your management system?
• Are senior leaders (preferably the senior leader) promoting Baldrige?
• Is your organization committed to performance excellence?

If you answer “no” to any of these questions, you can still conduct a Baldrige assessment and apply for the Baldrige and state awards and act on the opportunities to improve that are identified, but change will be slow and it will be hard to sustain. In the end, senior leadership must embrace Baldrige as a systematic, long-term approach to improving performance or you’re just diverting resources to a short-term program.

As Deming and Juran stated, 85-95% of an organization’s problems are caused by the system, not by the people working the system, and management controls the system. It will only improve if leaders act to improve it.

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