All Posts Tagged With: "sustainability"
Sustaining the Culture
Sustainability has become a major issue for organizations and leaders that want to sustain the positive changes they have made through programs such as Baldrige, lean, and Six Sigma, but the truth of the matter is that they can’t. Such programs often flounder as soon as new leadership takes over or priorities change or new ownership assumes control.
I’ve written about the impact of leadership changes in “Leadership Matters Most,” citing the example of AT&T Universal Card Services, which was launched using the Baldrige model, climbed to second in the U.S. credit card industry in just 30 months, and then changed leadership and dropped to eighth over the next 30 months.
In “Keep Your Eye on Process Improvement” (HBR, August 18, 2010), Brad Power recounts the story of Allied Signal, which used Six Sigma in the 1990s to produce 31 straight quarters of earnings-per-share growth of 13% or more. Leadership changed in 2000 and 18 months later, the Six Sigma culture had essentially disappeared.
Sustainability of the positive changes associated with Baldrige, lean, and Six Sigma is not difficult if leadership and ownership don’t change, but such changes are inevitable. CEOs move on, quit, or retire. Companies merge or are acquired. So the ultimate sustainability…
23Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedLeading Also Means Managing
Some leaders believe that leadership and management are two different things and they are only responsible for one of them. In “True Leaders Are Also Managers” (HBR, August 11, 2010), Robert I. Sutton uses the words of Warren Bennis to describe a common perception: “To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The distinction is crucial.”
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…
Sustainability Forces Wheel
In strategic planning, the quality of the plan depends on the quality of the information collected and analyzed to guide the plan. The Baldrige Criteria ask how you collect and analyze information about your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; early indications of major shifts in technology, markets, products, customer preferences, competition, or the regulatory environment; long-term organizational sustainability; and your ability to execute your strategic plan.
The goal is to build a sustainable organization that can survive change in whatever form it takes. Andrew Winston has created a tool to help navigate the forces that may affect your organization’s survival. He calls it the Sustainability Forces Wheel.
In “A New Tool for Understanding Sustainability Drivers” (HBR, July 13, 2010), Winston describes the three rings that make up his wheel and his idea to “spin” the wheel to line up different forces on each ring, which could then spur discussion among leaders about what that combination might mean for their organization. For example, he looks at the issues that currently line up at 9:00: “Consumers increasingly want to know what’s in products and where they come from; technology is enabling more data on a product’s origins; and there’s no denying the rising concerns about…
13Jul2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedThe First Healthcare Sustainability Scorecard for Suppliers
In “Kaiser Permanent Launches Health Care Industry’s First Sustainability Scorecard,” by Ariel Schwartz (May 4, 2010), Fast Company shows us the scorecard’s SKU-level questions that suppliers must answer:
- NICU product?
- PICU product?
- Latex-free?
- Lead, Mercury, Hexavalent chromium, Polybrominated biphenyls, Polyborminated diphenyl ether, <1,000ppm or Cadmium <100ppm
- Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC)-free?
- Diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP)-free?
- California Prop 65 Chemical <threshold or warning level
- Product – Contain more than 10% post-consumer recycled content?
- Primary Packaging – Contain more than 5% post-consumer recycled content?
- Secondary packaging – Contain more than 30% post-consumer recycled content?
- Product – Designed for multi-use (i.e., not a single-use device)?
- Manufacturer’s product code for environmentally preferable alternative
The desired answer for questions 3 through 11 is “yes.”
Kaiser Permanente claims that, if all things are equal between competing suppliers, the scorecard will be the deciding factor.
The article provides an example, courtesy of Robert Gotto, executive director in Kaiser’s Procurement & Supply group:
5May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued“One contract we went through last year was for a rigid endoscope provider. We evaluated the four major players and found that clinical performance and pricing were comparable, but there were big differences in terms of sustainability performance. One supplier had the foresight to develop a camera that doesn’t need to be sterilized with chemicals. It uses steam instead, and we can cut down chemicals in…
Sustainability: A Business Imperative
If your organization isn’t on the environmental responsibility bandwagon yet, what are you waiting for? Last year Wal-Mart announced plans to investigate more than 100,000 suppliers with a Sustainability Index. Now, according to Fast Company, “IBM is following Wal-Mart’s lead by asking its 28,000 suppliers in 60 countries to establish environmental goals and measure energy conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, and waste management/recycling practices.” (“IBM to Suppliers: Embrace Sustainability…Or Else,” Ariel Schwartz, April 14, 2010)
The Baldrige Criteria ask how you consider societal well-being and benefit as part of your operations, including the environmental systems to which you contribute. As with everything in the Baldrige model, acting on your environmental responsibility requires well-defined and deployed processes that align with your mission and vision and support sustainability and long-term success.
IBM seeks the same systemic approach by its suppliers. According to Wayne Balta, IBM’s VP for corporate environmental affairs and product safety, “We want them all to build long-term sustainability in a way that is integral to their routine operations, not as an add-on fix.”
The Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program (VACSP) Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center, which won the Baldrige Award in 2009, is a small organization of approximately 112 people that supports and manages…
15Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHow Can You Stay on Top?
For years, if you wanted the highest quality car, you bought a Toyota. Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler floundered. Toyota’s reputation grew. The Toyota Production System was the poster child for Lean, for eliminating waste and shortening cycle times while improving quality in the process.
And then its goal changed from being first in quality to being first in global sales. A culture built on slow-and-steady, where teams were given months to find solutions and leaders spent years developing their capabilities, gave way to quicker product launches, faster plant openings, and rapidly expanding supplier networks. Customer started to grumble. Flaws appeared. Recalls tarnished a reputation that seemed indestructible.
The Baldrige Criteria ask how you create a sustainable organization. That’s not the same question as how you sustain a great organization, and based on results, you can’t, at least not indefinitely. Companies rise and fall. Some reach the top and dominate the landscape for years, even decades, but they, too, eventually lose the lead.
Why is that inevitable? The Baldrige model can help your organization achieve performance excellence and it can help you sustain it, but for how long? New owners and chief executives enforce new agendas, hungry competitors draw away customers, and markets,…
17Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedBaldrige for the 20-Teens
Gill Corkindale is an executive coach and writer based in London. She recently wrote an article about Baldrige for the Harvard Business Review entitled “A Better Decade for Business is Coming” (December 31, 2009). And she wrote it without using the word “Baldrige” once!
Corkindale lists four things business leaders can do to correct the negative perception of business built during the past decade (Enron’s collapse, dotcom bust, Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, irresponsibility of the banking sector, global recession, declining wages—unless you’re an executive, etc.). Her four recommendations are:
- Examine your organization systematically. “What is really going on?” she writes. “What needs to be improved?” In other words, conduct a Baldrige assessment to answer these questions and systematically improve your organization.
- Build a new dialogue for business. Leaders must make ethical behavior, accountability, sustainability, longer-term focus, and community awareness part of the business agenda. Once again, a Baldrige assessment will help you understand how to make these issues part of your agenda and how well you do it.
- Engage people to make the best possible contribution to the business and wider society. “This means sharing power, information, responsibility, and, of course, rewards,” writes Corkindale. Workforce engagement, a key element of the Baldrige model, considers how you share…
