All Posts Tagged With: "sustainability"
The Most and Least Ethical Companies
According to Covalence, a Swiss research firm, Monsanto is the least ethical multinational corporation in the world. Covalence used quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate 581 companies over a seven-year period. Criteria included labor standards, waste management, and human rights records.
The top-ranked companies were IBM, Intel, and HSBC. Rounding out the top ten were Marks & Spencer, Unilever, Xerox, General Electric, Cisco Systems, Dell, and Procter & Gamble.
The worst were:
- Monsanto Co. This is the same corporation that Forbes named America’s Best Company in December. Apparently, ethics wasn’t part of the equation.
- Halliburton Company. Dick Cheney’s legacy lives on in both the business and political worlds.
- Chevron Corp.
- Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc.
- Philip Morris International Inc.
- Occidental Petroleum Corporation
- Ryanair Holdings plc
- Syngenta AG
- Grupo Mexico SA de CV
- Total SA
The companies on this list may survive in the short term because of their economic success, but sustaining that success is another matter. As Adam Werbach, former Sierra Club president, wrote, true sustainability has four equal parts: economic, social, environmental, and cultural (click here). It’s hard to imagine any corporation standing for long on one of those legs, no matter how strong it is.
To read more about corporate social responsibility, click on these articles:
- Corporate Social Responsibility
- Purpose-Inspired Growth
- New Guidelines for Social Responsibility
- Supporting Your Communities
- New Study of Corporate Citizenship
5 Added Values of the Baldrige Process
This is a guest article by Paul Grizzell. If you want to contribute an article to Baldrige.com, check out the guidelines here.
When visiting with senior leaders about the value of embarking on a Baldrige journey, a frequently used phrase is, “It’s not about the Award.” At that point, the discussion moves to writing an application, and the sense of leaders is: “We’re applying for an Award!” How do we convince leaders that there is value within the Baldrige process above and beyond applying for Baldrige or a state or local quality award?
Leaders need to understand what value the Baldrige process provides if it’s not just about the award, especially considering the investment of time involved in developing a 50-page application.
In my experience, five “added values” of the Baldrige process demonstrate the benefit of developing a Baldrige application—even if you never submit the application to an award process.
1. Accountability Tool. The structure of the Baldrige process forces accountability. When senior leaders take responsibility for a particular Baldrige category, they “own” the linkage among the three components of the application:
- Organizational Profile: What is important to the organization?
- Process categories: Based on what is important, what do we do, and how do we do it?
- Results category: Now that we’ve done it, were we successful?
2. Sustainability Tool. The Baldrige process helps document how business is done at the organization. The departure of a senior leader doesn’t have to mean we…
18Jan2010 | Paul Grizzell | 0 comments | ContinuedHarvard Business Review’s Most Influential Management Ideas of the Decade
Everybody has a Top 10 list and HBR is no different. Well, they’re a little different: Their editors came up with the Top 12 most influential management ideas since 2000 (“The Decade in Management Ideas,” Julia Kirby, January 1, 2010):
1. Shareholder Value as a Strategy. And not a good one. Even the guy who popularized it concurs. “Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy,” said Jack Welch. “Your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products.”
2. IT as a Utility. Cloud computing is the latest step toward buying computing capabilities as services.
3. The Customer Chorus. Technical and social developments have given customers a stronger and more pervasive voice—and companies are finding ways to listen.
4. Enterprise Risk Management. Chief risk officers hold the new umbrella over pockets of risk that had been scattered, and addressed separately, throughout the organization.
5. The Creative Organization. The ability to produce creative output was seen as a competitive advantage to encourage through collaboration and diverse perspectives.
6. Open Source. Wikipedia, which represents the power of open source, was born in 2001.
7. Going Private. According to the article, “As the decade wore on, private equity’s playbook for turning around businesses was increasingly held up as best-practice management,” especially in the areas of strategic focus and governance.
8. Behavioral Economics. Rational thought alone does not explain human decision-making. Yup, that’s the 2000’s in a nutshell.
9. High Potentials. Some managers are more equal than others…
4Jan2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued10 Steps to World Class
What are the characteristics of a high-performing organization? What do they do or how do they act to distinguish themselves? What can your organization do to join their ranks?
The Baldrige model has identified the beliefs and behaviors of high-performing organizations. These 11 core values and concepts, embedded in the Baldrige Criteria and in Baldrige Award recipients, are essential to achieving performance excellence. You can find the complete list here and an explanation of each in the Criteria booklets here.
So how do you get your organization from where it is today to world-class status? Twenty years of Baldrige reveal the steps you can take to create a high-performing organization:
- Lead the transformation. It won’t happen without leaders committed to excellence, and it won’t happen without recognizing that the steps you take will transform your organization. Plan the journey, communicate the plan, measure progress, and facilitate change.
♦To learn more, read Is Baldrige Right for Your Organization, 10 Critical Questions: Senior Leadership, and An Achievable Mission and Vision; - Develop management system experts. You will need these experts to help focus resources and attention on what must happen along your journey. Take a few existing or rising stars and ask them to be Baldrige or state award examiners for at least three years. The training and experience they get will give you the internal expertise you need.
♦To learn more, read How to Become a Baldrige Expert, Make Yourself More Valuable, and The Value of…
Identifying Capabilities Your Organization Needs
According to the Baldrige Criteria, strategy development involves collecting and analyzing data and information about internal capabilities, external factors, and long-term sustainability. If you only consider existing internal capabilities, you may miss major shifts in customer wants and needs that could be opportunities to grow.
A recent blog by Scott Anthony on HarvardBusiness.org identified a key area to consider as part of any strategic planning assessment. In “Constant Transformation Is the New Normal,” Anthony notes that “transformation requires a relentless outside-in focus” to identify opportunities for growth. “Then companies need to determine which of their capabilities they can borrow to seize that opportunity,” he writes, “which new capabilities they need to create, and which capabilities exist on the open market.”
Anthony quotes Jeff Bezos of Amazon who said, “If you want to really continually revitalize the service you provide the customer you can’t stop at what you’re good at. You have to ask what do our customers need and want. And no matter how hard it is, you better get good at those things.”
Building the capabilities you need to better serve your customers is the focus of another Criteria question: “How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs, including skills, competencies, and staffing levels?” As Anthony and Bezos observe, your organization had better include an outside-in focus during this assessment if you hope to meet current and future customer needs.
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28Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Baldrige? Saint Luke’s Makes the Case
In a new book on Saint Luke’s Health System’s quality journey, CEO G. Richard Hastings presents his organization’s case for using the Baldrige Criteria:
Using the Baldrige Criteria is just one way to improve and create sustainability in an organization. But for Saint Luke’s Health System, the Baldrige model was the best choice.
The criteria provided Saint Luke’s leaders with common language we could use with the Health System’s 8,000 employees. As a result, we can communicate consistently, achieve cooperation, and discuss our progress and failures. The criteria also created standards and benchmarks that we use to evaluate our performance and plan for the future.
Because the criteria are adaptable to individual circumstances, we can keep the diverse cultures of our small physician offices, more rural regional hospitals, and larger urban hospitals vibrant and alive, without stifling innovation and creativity. At the same time, we’re able to maintain a consistent approach and linked and aligned processes within our large system of care.
Using the Baldrige criteria requires Saint Luke’s to focus on results and then continually compare these results with the best organizations. For an organization that strives to be “The Best Place to Get Care and the Best Place to Give Care,” it’s a natural fit.
To learn more about how Saint Luke’s achieves world-class clinical and operational results, read Our Journey to Performance Excellence by Richard G. Hastings. You can order it through ASQ here.
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16Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Triple Bottom Line
John Elkington coined the phrase in 1998 in talking about the triple bottom line that 21st century companies must embrace: economic, environmental, and social. Others refer to this as the 3 Ps: profit, planet, and people. The goal is to make an organization more sustainable by expanding its focus beyond financial performance to those areas that support long-term success.
In the Baldrige model, the triple bottom line appears in the results it seeks for financial outcomes, customer- and workforce-focused outcomes, and social responsibility results, but the Baldrige model does not stop there. Category 7 also seeks results for product outcomes, process effectiveness outcomes, and leadership outcomes.
While the triple bottom line supports a balanced scorecard view of business performance, the “bottom line” part of it is problematic. Triple bottom line accounting means measuring environmental and social performance monetarily. There are standard ways for companies to measure and report financial performance. No standard ways currently exist to measure the monetary benefits of environmental and social performance.
I was reminded of the promise of a triple bottom line by a posting on the Monfort Institute’s blog, Sustainable Transformation. The Institute, which is part of the Monfort College of Business, a Baldrige Award recipient in 2004, was established to create, manage, and disseminate knowledge for global excellence. You can find out more about the Institute here.
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