They always do, of course. No company or leader can sustain performance excellence indefinitely. There are Baldrige Award winners that have failed after they received the Award, but so what? The Baldrige Award doesn’t guarantee unending success. It simply recognizes that, in the year it was received, that organization was one of the best-run organizations in the country. Next year, who knows? It’s like winning the Super Bowl one year (not that I’d know what that’s like, living in Minnesota) and expecting to win it next year and the year after, ad infinitum.

We’re focusing on the wrong thing. Baldrige Award winners have a lot to teach us about designing, managing, and improving effective processes in all areas of a management system. They have the results that show how well those processes work. We can learn from them. There’s nothing special about them. Their leaders are no more brilliant than your leaders. They don’t have magic processes that produce flawless results faster than humanly possible. They’ve learned, adapted, innovated, and persisted. Your organization can do that, too.

Baldrige.com is committed to bringing you the information you need to build the organization you want. No hero worship here—although we do get a little giddy about an exceptional process. Our goal is to share the ideas, approaches, and best practices that can benefit all parts of your management system with the understanding that this information, like the organizations it comes from, has a shelf life.

So pull yourself away from the pedestal and get back to work on those fundamental changes that can make your organization better. That’s what the real heroes do.

To read more about how to improve your organization, click on these articles:

• 10 Steps to World Class
• 80 Critical Questions
• Baldrige Gets Results
• How to Integrate Baldrige
• Making Change Happen

The Economist recently described the problems Toyota faces and how it is addressing them (“Losing Its Shine,” December 10, 2009). While the company seems to have fixed its quality issues—Toyota had 18 of the 48 leading vehicles in the recent Consumer Reports reliability study—quality is no longer a big differentiator in the automobile industry. Instead, Toyota’s “vehicles will inevitably be judged increasingly on more emotional criteria, such as styling, ride, handling, and cabin design.”

Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder and its president since June, recognizes the need for innovative design. He recently said, “I want to see Toyota build cars that are fun and exciting to drive.”

That may be a challenge. Toyota’s value proposition has been built upon quality and reliability. Its culture, defined by the Toyota Production System, completely supports that value proposition. Steering in a new direction using a system developed for a different purpose will prove difficult.

That’s the strategic challenge Toyota faces. It has set the standard for quality and reliability in its industry and rose to the top on these core competencies. It forced its competitors to catch up and most of them did. Now it must develop new competencies in design, innovation, and customer engagement to remain the industry leader.

To find out more about strategic challenges and advantages, read:

• Developing Critical Capabilities
• Being Good at the Right Things
• What Are Your Critical Success Factors?
• Identifying Capabilities Your Organization Needs
• What Are Your Organization’s Core Competencies?

There’s ample evidence of that among Baldrige Award recipients. All winners are required to share information on their performance and strategies with other U.S. organizations. Many provide tours and offer workshops for interested leaders and use those workshops to identify best practices in other organizations. Several have formed consulting organizations to provide further support. They are teaching and, in the process, they are learning.

Taylor describes how Virginia Mason, a Seattle-based hospital system, became a healthcare leader by integrating the Toyota Production System. Last year, it created the Virginia Mason Institute to do what Baldrige Award recipients do: conduct tours, explain how they work, and share what they know. Its CEO, Dr. Gary Kaplan, said, “Part of our mission as a company is to help improve our industry. But the more we educate, the faster we move as well. This will spur us on, push us to keep getting better, and people will chase our taillights. Our credibility as a company is dependent on our ability to deliver results. By teaching others what we’ve learned, it forces us to keep learning.”

Organizational learning is a Baldrige core value exemplified by the learning—and teaching—of the Award recipients. You can learn from them by reading their award application summaries, available online here.

To find out more about organizational learning and benchmarking, read:

• Learn from the Best: Application Summaries
• KEYSTONE: Organizational Learning
• 10 Steps to World Class