Which Comes First: Facts or Opinions?

The Baldrige model supports fact-based decisions. Management by fact is one of 11 Baldrige core values. One of the seven categories in the Baldrige Criteria focuses on measurement and analysis. Measurement—“how do you know?”—is woven into questions throughout the other five “process” categories, and the results of your key measures are reported in the seventh category.

Here’s what management guru Peter Drucker wrote on the topic: “Executives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.”

I disagree.

According to Drucker, which Stephen Wunker addresses in his post on the HBR Blog Network here, if leaders do not make their opinions clear, they will simply find the facts that confirm what they believe. The problem is that the opinions and the confirmatory facts push the organization in one direction without considering other courses of action. Wunker writes, “Decision makers may have a general sense of stakeholders’ opinions, but in their eagerness to act and to avoid controversy they do not probe to understand these perspectives fully. Rather, they quickly make a decision and then marshal facts to support it.”

In the Baldrige model, the process of understanding opinions and perspectives fully would be part of the strategy development process, which encourages collecting and analyzing data and information to create an effective plan. As a result, decision makers can generate informed opinions based on their interpretation of fact-based knowledge about markets, customers, competitors, internal capabilities, and long-term needs. Rather than basing their opinions on assumptions and best guesses,…

9 Indices for Your Balanced Scorecard

As the Baldrige program works on its own balanced scorecard (more here), Mark Graham Brown, a Baldrige expert who also happens to be a measurement expert, recently wrote about how leaders are populating their scorecards with more indices to provide more meaningful measurement. The indices consist of three to five submeasures. In his article in BusinessFinance, available here, he lists “the nine most useful and creative performance measures I have seen in government and business organizations over the last few years”:

1. Communication Effectiveness Index. The frequency and media used to communicate important messages is worth 30-40% and the effectiveness of the communication is worth 60-70% of the index.
2. Customer Relationships Index. The index includes two major components: customer attractiveness (based on such factors as profit margin, volume of business, timely payment, ease to work with, and history/partnering with suppliers) and customer relationship (i.e., number of years working together, products purchased, knowledge of customer’s business and needs, etc.).
3. Employee Satisfaction Index. This index may include casual absenteeism, complaints/grievances, voluntary turnover, employee focus groups, overtime, and employee survey data.
4. Distraction Index. Employees record hours worked each week, sorted into three categories: (a) job – tasks that are directly part of doing your job; (b) administration – activities you need to do, such as preparing budgets, attending meetings, learning about new programs, etc.; and, (c) programs – management programs such as Six Sigma, balanced scorecard, and strategic planning. The goal is to minimize administrative requirements and time spent on management programs.
5. Trust Index. The index addresses honesty and integrity and may include an…

What Path Is Your Organization Taking?

In the day-to-day effort make an organization work, it’s easy to lose sight of the path your organization is on and the direction that path is taking you. The Baldrige model helps you see the big picture and how the work you are doing supports—or ignores—your mission and vision.

The question leaders of organizations, business units, divisions, departments, and teams need to continually ask is: What is truly important? Baldrige can help you answer that.

Quality Companion Supports Quality Improvement

(This guest post was written by Cate Twohill, product marketing manager at Minitab. To learn more about Quality Companion, click on the box on the right.)

A few years ago, I co-authored a white paper outlining The Three Keys to Six Sigma Success.  The paper concluded that, by focusing on the key principles of project selection, securing executive support, and executing the DMAIC method, quality practitioners could increase their overall project success rate. This is proven to be true time and again.

I know what you’re thinking: “OK, but these principles are neither ground-breaking nor new”—and you’d be correct. But what was fairly new at the time was Minitab’s process improvement software, Quality Companion. The all-in-one application supports continuous improvement activities across different levels of a quality program as well as many stages of improvement projects. By summarizing our voice of the customer research into a white paper, we were able to easily draw parallels between the keys for success and Companion’s features, tools, and forms.

Since then, Quality Companion has been updated with Lean Six Sigma support features, including Value Stream Mapping, and its user community continues to grow as does Minitab’s plans for ongoing software enhancements.

So, now you’re probably thinking: “Why is she writing about Lean and Six Sigma on a website that’s focused on Baldrige?”

Because, at their core, Lean, Six Sigma, and the Baldrige model are all systematic approaches to performance excellence. Regardless of the methodology in which you’re currently engaged, Companion can help you build on that systematic approach and improve how you…