All Posts Tagged With: "MEDRAD"
Two-Time Baldrige Award Winners Show Impressive Results
Five businesses have earned the Baldrige Award twice: Solectron, MEDRAD, Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Texas Nameplate, and Sunny Fresh Foods (which is now Cargill Kitchen Solutions). They represent large and small businesses, manufacturing, and service.
The Baldrige program analyzed the results of these five organizations to determine how much growth in sites, jobs, and revenue they achieved during the six- or seven-year period between their first and second Awards. To protect the proprietary nature of the data, the program focused on median growth, which is a conservative number, as explained by Harry Hertz, head of the Baldrige program, here.
As a group, the five businesses that won two Baldrige Awards grew significantly during the span between Awards:
- 67% growth in number of sites
- 63% growth in jobs
- 93% growth in revenue
It’s important to remember that these five organizations had to demonstrate impressive results to win their first Awards. They did not achieve this growth by resurrecting struggling companies but by building on their success integrating the Baldrige model. They started at the top and then they went even higher.
This is what any organization can expect if it rigorously deploys Baldrige. In my experience, the benefits start to accrue in the first year with new knowledge of…
31Aug2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedServant Leadership Boosts Employee Engagement
On his blog, Bret Simmons talks about a new study of 191 financial services teams and 999 total participants recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The study showed that employee engagement soared when employees believed that their teams were safe places for individual risk taking, which is a result of servant leadership.
The study examined both transformational leadership and servant leadership. A transformational leader offers a compelling agenda of high performance and change and a clear structure to help team members pursue it. This promotes cognition-based trust, which, according to Simmons, is “is trust based on the belief that the leader is competent, responsible, reliable, and dependable.”
A servant leader genuinely cares and is concerned about each team member and gives each person the opportunity and responsibility to act in the team’s best interests. This promotes affect-based trust, “which is trust based on the emotional bond to the leader.”
Cognition-based trust predicts team potency, while affect-based trust predicted team psychological safety. While both significantly improved team performance, “the size of the effect of team psychological safety was almost double the size of the effect of team potency,” Simmons wrote.
The study concluded: “Engaging in the behaviors associated with servant leadership and transformational leadership is…
30Mar2011 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedMEDRAD: Win with Your People
“We fight with our products, but we win with our people.”
The quote from Jeff Owoc, senior VP of Operations for MEDRAD, captures a competitive advantage of this two-time Baldrige Award winner, which is featured in “Continuous Improvement Sets Stage for Success” (Adrienne Selko, IndustryWeek, December 22, 2010).
MEDRAD sandwiched its Baldrige Award victories in 2003 and 2010 around recognition as an IW Best Plant in 2007. I worked with MEDRAD on the applications for these awards and saw firsthand how the alignment of its people with its goals and strategies along with its culture of involvement and empowerment drive continuous improvement and market leadership.
MEDRAD manufactures medical devices for diagnosing and treating diseases including fluid injection systems for radiology and cardiology and equipment for visualization procedures such as magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography. When I started working with the company it was independent but is now part of Bayer HealthCare, yet it has maintained its commitment to continuous improvement throughout.
It is the market leader in the U.S. and Europe for most of its products. In many cases, it has more than twice the market share of its leading competitor. Its revenues have grown from $120 million in 1997 to $625 million in…
22Dec2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Great Organizations Achieve
The bottom-line question every senior leader asks about Baldrige is: What does this management system stuff have to do with the bottom line?
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…
22Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedIdentifying Key Work Processes
Organizations new to the Baldrige Criteria often wonder what they should list as their “key work processes” (6.1b1). The Criteria booklet describes them as “your most important internal value creation processes” that “involve the majority of your organization’s workforce and produce” customer/student/stakeholder/stockholder/market value.
I always thought MEDRAD did a great job of identifying and depicting its key work processes in its Award-winning 2003 Baldrige application, as shown in the figure below. Using the MEDRAD model as a guide, you can look for your most important work processes in the following places (you can substitute the language of healthcare or education as needed):
Value Creation Processes
- Identifying, understanding, and serving customers and markets
- Designing products and services
- Producing and delivering products and services
- Marketing and selling products and services
- Billing and supporting/servicing customers
- Determining customer satisfaction and retention
Support Processes
- Developing and deploying strategies, goals, and plans
- Managing financial and physical assets
- Managing information resources and technology
- Recruiting, developing, and retaining high-performing employees
- Managing legal, regulatory, environmental, health, and safety issues
- Managing improvement, innovation, and change
- Managing external relationships (suppliers, distributors, partners, etc.)
Identifying key work processes is one of those basic exercises that the Criteria request but few organizations have taken the time to nail down.
And it’s another reason a Baldrige assessment is so valuable.
Help grow our…
31Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
