All Posts Tagged With: "systems perspective"
Baldrige Systems Perspective
How do you make the argument for integrating Baldrige at your organization?
Those of us who have “witnessed the miracles,” as Joseph Juran described it, know that integrating Baldrige can help any organization achieve its goals. Organizations that have fully integrated the model and received the Baldrige Award in recognition of their efforts have produced world-class results in key customer, quality, employee, and financial measures.
So start there, with the results. Senior leaders seek improvement in the measures of the organization’s – and of their – success. Figure out which measures matter most and show how similar organizations achieved excellence by integrating Baldrige.
Next, identify the critical goals and strategic objectives for senior leaders and the obstacles or issues that stand in their way. Chances are, these obstacles fall into common categories:
- Not clear what customers or markets want
- Quality, cycle time, and/or cost need to be improved
- Need innovation in products and services
- Processes do not produce needed results
- Employees not engaged
- No consistency or alignment with what’s really important
All of these issues will be addressed by integrating the Baldrige model, and that’s a key point to make: All of these issues will be addressed, not just the top one or two and not just the most visible obstacles.…
3Oct2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | 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 | ContinuedA Baldrige Award Winner’s Health Pyramid
The Baldrige model values a systems perspective. One of the most impressive system perspectives I’ve seen was shared by Heartland Health, a 2009 Baldrige Award winner, in its award application summary. It’s called the Health Pyramid.
There’s a lot going on in this diagram and it all relates to how Heartland Health (HH) serves the health care needs of its communities.
The “tip of the iceberg” shows the diseases that most healthcare organization in the U.S. spend all of their time and money treating. HH provides this care through the Heartland Regional Medical Center (HRMC), a 353-bed tertiary care hospital, and Heartland Clinic (HC), a group of 107 physicians.
The causes of death from these diseases, human behaviors such as tobacco use, poor diet, and inactivity, are less visible but more important to actually preventing disease. HH promotes health and provides disease management and insurance to individuals and companies that need coverage through its Community Health Improvement Services (CHIS) and through HRMC, HC, and the Heartland Foundation (HF).
The drivers of these behavioral choices are the root causes of poor health. According to HH’s application, the Heartland Foundation “empowers youth, adults, and organizations to build better, healthier, and more livable communities and does so…
16Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedFailure of Business Leadership
Baldrige is a big-picture model that addresses all of the elements in a management system. As someone wrote, all organizations function as a system, whether or not they are managed as one. As Deming and Juran noted, 80% or more of the problems an organization faces are problems with the system. Since the organization’s leaders are responsible for the system, 80% or more of the problems their organizations encounter are leadership problems.
The problems American businesses are currently facing are leadership problems and no group owns more responsibility for leading us into those problems than the Chamber of Commerce. Robert L. Borosage, president of the Institute for America’s Future, summed up the issue very well:
9Sep2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued“This country is struggling to respond to the worst downturn since the Great Depression, a direct result of the failed conservative policies that the Chamber of Commerce has advocated for decades. Over the last decade, we lost one in three manufacturing jobs. Inequality reached gilded age levels. CEOs and bankers pocketed million dollar bonuses while cooking the books and gambling on exotic securities, inflating the housing bubble until it burst. Health insurance companies kept a stranglehold on a health care system that costs twice as much as…
The Organization You Want
What information do you need to build the organization you want?
We’ve been answering that question now for one year with nearly 370 articles on all aspects of a world-class management system. Our guide for what to address is the Baldrige model defined by the Baldrige Criteria and used to determine Baldrige Award winners. No other management model in the world has been as thoroughly tested, refined, and deployed.
The goal of any management system is to produce the results you want your organization to achieve. Ideally, those results align with your organization’s mission and vision. In world-class organizations, results are multi-dimensional and not just profits for a business or test results for a school. The Baldrige Criteria identify six areas where excellent results are necessary for long-term success.
The rest of the Baldrige Criteria address the development and deployment of the systematic processes needed to achieve world-class results. The Baldrige model is a process model: It asks how you do what you do more than 130 times.
Process has four dimensions:
- The approach you use to get something done
- Consistent deployment of the approach to all relevant areas of the organization
- Refining the approach through cycles of learning
- The integration of your approach with the rest of your management system
Questions…
12Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSystem Failure
I’ve been travelling for a couple days, which was one day longer than it was supposed to be, so I missed a couple of posts but I did get to experience an appalling inability to meet basic customer requirements that sounds like an ongoing system failure.
I’m talking about Delta Airlines. I was scheduled to fly back from Lexington, Kentucky, on Monday night at 7:30. I heard an announcement that a flight from Atlanta to Lexington had been delayed so I checked with the Delta rep at the gate to see if that was my airplane. It wasn’t. I joked about how lucky I was to get a plane coming from Detroit. She said the flights from Atlanta and Detroit seemed to alternate having trouble.
As take-off time approached, we were told that the plane’s engine wouldn’t start and a mechanic had been called. Twenty minutes later he showed up. About 45 minutes later we were told the plane was ready to go and we trudged out to the last plane leaving Lexington that night.
Once everyone was settled and the door closed, we waited and waited and waited for the engines to start and cheered when they finally kicked in. We taxied…
30Jun2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | ContinuedGet Out of the Office
A recent post by Seth Godin got me thinking about a question in the Baldrige Criteria: How do you design and innovate your overall work system?
Godin’s post, Goodbye to the office, asks why people go to their office, plant, or factory. As he notes, “If we were starting this whole office thing today, it’s inconceivable we’d pay the rent/time/commuting cost to get what we get. I think in ten years the TV show ‘The Office’ will be seen as a quaint antique.”
I’m not so sure about that. True, we’ve already seen a trend toward more telecommuting, but the office mentality is so ingrained that it will take a few organizations revolutionizing the way we work—and making it fun, desirable, and profitable—to really get this ball rolling, and I don’t think that’s going to be widespread in ten years.
Having said that, the organizations that abandon the office concept in favor of something more efficient and relevant to today’s world will carve out an immediate competitive advantage. Young workers in particular will be attracted to the idea. They are already used to a more flexible environment with their phones and their friending and their connecting with friends through their phones. If they…
22Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
