Moving Faster

As organizations grow, they lose their ability to move fast. Layers of management and pages of policies conspire against quick action. Hierarchical leadership structures delay decisions until word comes from the top. Functional silos put their priorities first and the organization’s needs second. Employees know what needs to be done but they lack the authority or, too often, the desire, to do it.

Agility is a core value of the Baldrige model and a distinguishing characteristic of recent Baldrige Award recipients. As the Criteria for Performance Excellence state, “Success in today’s ever-changing, globally competitive environment demands agility–a capacity for rapid change and flexibility.”

The Criteria ask how senior leaders create an environment for organizational agility. In an interview for the McKinsey Quarterly, John Chambers, CEO and chairman of Cisco Systems, admits that “I’m a command-and-control guy. It clearly has worked well for me. I say, turn right, 66,000 people turn right. But that’s not the future. The future’s going to be all around collaboration and teamwork, with a structured process behind it. And that’s the key. You can’t move fast without a replicable process. So it’s about speed, combined with technology enablement, combined with a replicable process.”

Integrating the Baldrige model is a proven way to design, manage, and improve replicable processes in all areas of an organization.

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company has received two Baldrige Awards. It has a replicable process for providing prompt, high-quality customer service: Every…