All Posts Tagged With: "vision"
Heartland Health’s Grand Unifying System
As a student of the Baldrige model, I am always attracted to a diagram, a “grand unifying system,” that shows how an organization aligns and integrates everything it does with its vision and mission. The latest example of such a diagram is Heartland Health’s Organizational Architecture (HH OA), which is shown below.
Heartland Health received the Baldrige Award in 2009. You can read its entire award application summary here. It is based in St. Joseph, Missouri, and employs more than 3,200 caregivers. Heartland Health is ranked in the top 15% of hospitals nationally for patient safety and is a leader in patient satisfaction. Using Six Sigma methods, it has saved more than $25 million as a result of process improvements.
The HH OA shows how many of the key elements in the Baldrige model work together to help Heartland Health achieve its vision and mission. Information from the Voice of the Customer (Category 3 in the Baldrige Criteria) feeds the strategic planning process (Category 2), as do strategic business assessments based on performance results (Category 7) and senior leadership reviews (“Manage and Improve,” Category 1). The strategic plan is deployed through the management model, which is aligned with the first six categories of the Baldrige model. The Process Model identifies Heartland Health’s key work processes (Category 6), each of which has a Process Scorecard for each service and product line and Performance Scorecard that feed the organization’s…
10May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedSeeking Authentic Leaders
Bill George (no relation), former CEO of Medtronic, likes to talk about “authentic leaders” who focus on customers rather than hierarchical leaders who serve short-term shareholders. In a recent article on Harvard Business Review, “The New 21st Century Leaders” (April 30, 2010), George writes about four critical tasks today’s leaders must perform, all of which are addressed and supported by the Baldrige model:
Aligning. The highest-performing Baldrige organizations excel and alignment and integration. They have found that their missions and visions can only be achieved if everyone is moving toward them. Baldrige Award winners typically use their strategic plans to define this direction and the deployment of those plans and of balanced scorecards to make sure everyone is working on what is most important to the organization.
Empowering. Things are moving too fast to wait for marching orders from your supervisor, who must wait for her manager, who must wait for his director, who must wait for her vice president, who must wait for the president. Baldrige Award winners empower their people to make decisions by training, directing, and recognizing them and by holding them accountable.
Collaborating. We can’t do it alone, and that’s true of individuals or departments or business units or entire organizations. Baldrige Award winners blur the lines between themselves and their customers, suppliers, competitors, and communities, focusing on cooperation and the common good.
As Bill George concludes, “Top-down leaders may achieve near-term results, but only authentic leaders…
3May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Baldrige Formula for Success
If you’re looking for a repeatable formula for success, integrate the Baldrige model. The fact that it’s been repeated by dozens of organizations of all types, each with impressive results, affirms that the management model defined by the Baldrige Criteria is a formula for success.
Bain & Co. decided that integrating Baldrige was too obvious, so it spent ten years studying more than 2,000 companies to find the formula for success. Jill Jusko lists the five principles Bain came up with in “A Repeatable Formula for Success” (IndustryWeek, March 16, 2010):
1. Know what the core of your organization is and how you’ve made it work for you. This may include four to seven assets such as brand and talent. In Baldrige terms, it means identifying your core competencies and building on them.
2. Have up to ten non-negotiable principles upon which your organization is built. Baldrige calls these your mission, vision, and values.
3. Prefer distributed leadership, which means fewer layers of management. Baldrige doesn’t prescribe distributed leadership, but it does promote empowerment and agility, which are often associated with fewer layers of management.
4. Keep information coming in from customers through a strong, closed feedback loop system. The Baldrige Criteria ask a number of questions about how you build a customer culture and how you listen to customers.
5. Keep the number of key operating measures small and be sure everyone at levels understands and believes in them. Again, Baldrige doesn’t tell…
17Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedLessons from India’s Business Leaders
Peter Cappelli writes for Harvard Business Review today about the commitment of Indian leaders “to social goals that extend beyond the interests of their firms.” (“Indian Companies: Doing Well Because They Do Good”) Cappelli and his colleagues interviewed the leaders of the 100 largest companies in India. “Every executive we interviewed described the main objective of their company in terms of a social mission,” writes Cappelli, who contrasts the dark path American companies have taken (corporate lobbyists subverting the public good, excess executive compensation, second worst shareholder performance among developed countries over the last decade) with the bright future of Indian companies (second best overall growth rate in the world, competing and winning in high-skilled service industries, acquiring foreign companies that then perform better).
For Indian companies, “business strategy rests on the social mission.” Bharti Airtel’s business strategy focuses on getting cell phones into the hands of people who have no means to communicate. ICICI Bank’s business strategy focuses on providing financial help to those with no access to banking. Dr. Reddy’s business strategy focuses on addressing the healthcare needs of the poor worldwide.
Dr. Reddy’s, a pharmaceutical company, provides for the healthcare needs of 40,000 children. Such charitable support is another characteristic of Indian leaders and their companies. Infosys has built and staffed entire hospitals in different parts of the country. Tata Group gives 65% of its profits to charities.
Cappelli points to two reasons why Indian…
12Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedManagement’s Five Deadly Diseases
W. Edwards Deming was one of the world’s great management experts, and his thinking helped shape the Baldrige Criteria. Like his friend and peer, Joseph Juran, Deming believed that nearly every problem an organization faces is a problem of management. And he didn’t have a very high opinion of management.
Art Petty reminds us that Deming remains very relevant on his blog, Management Excellence (click here). He links to a 15-minute video in which Deming describes management’s five deadly diseases (click here for video). Despite Deming’s strange speaking style, the video is interesting because he forcefully makes his case against management problems he had identified during decades of work with all types of organizations.
The five deadly diseases are:
- Lack of constancy of purpose. People haven’t decided what business they are in and as a result, they are unable to plan for the future.
- Emphasis on short-term problems—also known as worshiping the quarterly dividend. Leaders have no plan to stay in business by improving the quality of their products and services. Such short-term thinking produces unemployment, which is a sign of bad management, which means there’s a whole lot of bad management still going on in this country today.
- Annual rating of performance. It’s an arbitrary and unjust system that annihilates long-term planning and teamwork. People work in fear. As Deming said, rewarding performance sounds great but it can’t be done.
- Mobility of management. It takes a long time to understand how a company…
Co-Creating a Shared Vision
Ryan Martens at the Agile Development Blog recently talked about strategies for adopting Agile in larger organizations and he referred to a 5-stage process described by Peter Senge and others in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Currency Doubleday, 1994). Senge’s books are bibles for systems thinkers. In the section Martens refers to, the book outlines a strategy for building a shared vision.
A shared vision replaces command-and-control management. Leaders used to be able to get people to do things by commanding them to do it. Some still do that today. The problem with this approach is (a) the hierarchy it demands is slow and no organization can afford to be slow any more, (b) employees who only do as they are told are not as innovative, productive, or engaged as the organization needs them to be, and (c) most employees hate it.
The alternative to telling people what to do is to involve them is creating a shared vision, “a sense of purpose that binds people together and propels them to fulfill their deepest aspirations,” according to the field book.
The book identifies five stages, shown in the diagram above, to help build the listening capacity of senior leaders and the leadership capabilities of the rest of the organization. You can follow these stages to bind people together in a work unit, department, or division, or around an initiative like Agile. The key, according to Senge, is to assess which stage…
14Jan2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Matters Now
Author and blogger Seth Godin got 70 big thinkers to share an idea to consider in the year ahead. Each contributor chose a word and then described why it is important. Godin compiled them in a free e-book called What Matters Now, available here.
My favorite Baldrige-related words, with excerpts from their explanations, are:
- Vision. “Vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It is what keeps it moving forward.” Michael Hyatt, CEO, Thomas Nelson Publishers
- Excellence. Tom Peters lists the 19 E’s of Excellence including execution, empowerment, engaged, and encompassing.
- Unsustainability. “We really need to focus on raising the costs of the unsustainable systems that represent the unsustainable status quo” like failed educational systems, obesity-producing systems, energy systems, transportation systems, and health care systems. Alan M. Webber, co-founding editor of Fast Company magazine
- Autonomy. “If we want engagement, and the mediocrity-busting results it produces, we have to make sure people have autonomy over the four most important aspects of their work” – task, time, technique, and team. Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind.
- Power. “Stop waiting around for bosses and companies to get better and complaining about how you are treated,” wrote Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor at Stanford Business School. “Build the skills—and use them—that will permit you to create the environment in which you want to live.”
- Productivity. “Don’t worry too much about getting things done. Make things happen.” Gina Trapani blogs at Smarterware
And the word that captures our purpose…
24Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
