I remember helping a manufacturer early in its Baldrige application process. It was its industry’s worldwide leader and had been for several years. It worked closely with its distributors and had ongoing customer contact. It assumed it knew what each customer group required even though it had never formally determined those requirements or tested them with customers to make sure the lists were right.

When I presented my evaluation of its application to senior leadership, my first point was that it did not have a rock-solid understanding of customer requirements. I thought they were going to tear my throat out until the president interrupted and said he thought I had a point. As a result, the company hired a market research firm to close this gap. Two years later, it received the Baldrige Award.

The Baldrige model is a process model. The starting point for any effective process is knowing what the customers of that process require. That’s true at the macro level — profound knowledge of what your customers require of your organization — and at the micro level — profound knowledge of what customers require of each process. Plunging ahead on the assumption that you know these requirements puts your organization on shaky footing.

To read more about understanding customer requirements, click on these articles:

• Smart Question #3: Who Are Our Customers and What Do They Require?
• Kano Satisfaction Model
• Be Careful How You Measure Customer Satisfaction
• Walk in Your Customer’s Body Armor
• KEYSTONE: Customer Knowledge

On his blog, Seth Godin lists five reasons he thinks higher education is about to crash and burn:

1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students. We no longer live in an industrial economy that demands standardized students. In a networked, global economy, we need to teach students how to think critically, solve problems, work together, and be creative. Most colleges fail to do that for the majority of their students.

2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up. Godin includes a chart that shows the inflation of tuition and fees compared to medical costs and the cost of living. Since 1978, tuition and fees have risen by a factor of 9.5, medical costs by a factor of 6, and the cost of living by a factor of 3.2. We hear a lot of outrage over medical costs, which suggests that outrage over the cost of college is likely not far behind.

3. The definition of “best” is under siege. According to Godin, colleges send millions of pieces of junk mail to high school students to boost the number of applicants so that they can reject more of them, which raises their rank in US News. As Godin writes, “Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it appear to be more useful?”

4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect. Data show that a degree “doesn’t translate into better career opportunities, a better job, or more happiness.”

5. Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem. Uniform accreditation programs fail to produce the right product: the leaders and problem-solvers that we need.

Like the K-12 schools they draw from, colleges need to rethink their missions and visions, the needs of society and of their students, and the knowledge and skills that are truly essential to produce intelligent, productive, curious, confident students. Failing to do that, they will become increasingly irrelevant in a rapidly changing world.

To read more about Baldrige and higher education, click on these articles:

• What’s the Real Value of a College Education?
• Inspiration for a New Education System
• MHA Programs Fail to Prepare Students
• Accreditation through Baldrige
• Baldrige Goes to College