All Posts Tagged With: "visionary leadership"
Baldrige and Process Improvement
“Have you seen process owners or other organizational structures that sustain cross-functional process improvement?”
Brad Power poses this question at the end of his article, “Where Have All the Process Owners Gone?” (HBR, January 7, 2011). Anyone who’s been following Baldrige.com or been involved with integrating Baldrige or evaluating Baldrige assessments knows that some of this country’s best examples of “organizational structures that sustain cross-functional process improvement” are Baldrige Award winners.
The Baldrige model is a process model. The first six of seven categories in the Baldrige Criteria ask how you design, manage, and improve your key processes, while the seventh category requests the results of those processes. Each Baldrige Award winner has found its own way to improve processes, some of which include process owners and most of which use similar quality tools and techniques.
They have also developed systematic approaches to sustaining process improvement. Power bemoans the fact that too many organizations attempt process improvement by establishing process owners, only to revert to functional management in the end. He suggests six reasons for this; none of these reasons hold true at Baldrige Award winners.
- Attention shifted. Organizations lose their focus on process improvement when senior leaders are distracted by new or more urgent issues.…
Corporate Social Responsibility in 2010
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to gain momentum among a wide range of people from customers to employees to senior leaders. More organizations are seeking more systematic ways to answer a Baldrige Criteria question: How do you contribute to the well-being of your environmental, social, and economic systems?
FastCompany expert blogger Alice Korngold follows the CSR story. She identified four CSR trends in 2010 (“The Year in CSR: The Four Trends of 2010,” December 21, 2010):
1. Leadership matters. Korngold talks about the annual September meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative at which “scores of CEOs from global corporations” reported “on the completion of previous years’ multimillion dollar commitments and made new commitments to address global social, economic, and environmental challenges.” These are not tree-hugging dreamers but the kind of visionary leaders Baldrige applauds. “Corporate leaders with vision are recognizing that by advancing global solutions, they can create valuable renewable resources to their advantage, establish new markets for their companies, and otherwise unleash tremendous opportunities,” she writes.
2. Consumers care. According to the 2010 Cone Shared Responsibility Study, 84% of Americans believe their ideas can help companies create products and services that are a win for consumers, business, and society, but only half (53%) feel companies are…
23Dec2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedLeadership Matters Most
The ease or difficulty in transforming a management system lies with the leaders of that system. I’ve worked with five Baldrige Award winners and in every case, their executives drove the renovation of their management systems. No company did it the same way: Some had it mastered in a few years while others took a decade or more. Not every senior leader felt strongly about the Baldrige model or the evaluation and improvement process it supports, but as long as the top executive did, it didn’t matter.
Executive attitudes toward creating a sound management system regularly surprise me. Those who recognize its value preach this systems perspective with the fervor of true believers. Those who don’t buy into it bide their time until the boss leaves and they can return to what they know is best. The trouble is, what they know is best is rarely as good as the systems approach they abandon.
Motorola, IBM, and AT&T dominated in the late 1980s and early 1990s when their leaders conducted regular, formal assessments of their management systems. As that process waned, so did their fortunes. AT&T formed its Universal Card Services division in 1990 with a management system based on the Baldrige…
21Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Drives You?
Daniel Pink wrote a book about what motivates us to do what we do called Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. I have the book in my hand but I haven’t read it yet, but this video has inspired me to dig into it.
It turns out that study after study has shown that money works if you want people to perform simple, rudimentary tasks, but if you want them to do something more complex, you need the three elements of true motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
To learn more, watch the video — and then join me in reading the book.
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6Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedA Baldrige Leader
[Note: E. David Spong is the only person to lead two different organizations in two different sectors to winning the Baldrige Award. Next week he takes over as president of the American Society for Quality. This is the story of how he helped two Boeing organizations become world class.]
When E. David Spong joined Boeing Airlift and Tanker Programs’ executive team in 1991, he stepped onto a burning platform. “We had a deep, deep crisis,” said Spong. “We had a morale problem, a leadership problem, and a process problem, and we knew that, if we didn’t turn the program around, we’d be out of work.”
Ninety percent of A&T’s business came from U.S. Air Force orders for the C-17 airlifter, a plane capable of carrying a 170,000-pound load. Boeing A&T had an order for 40 of the planes with the potential to build 120, but technical problems, cost overruns, and late deliveries led the Defense Department to threaten cancellation of the additional planes and their $14.2 billion price tag. A&T’s general manager, John McDonnell, decided to use the Baldrige criteria for an internal assessment as a way to identify and prioritize major problems.
Their first effort earned 200 points. McDonnell’s executive team, including…
27May2010 | 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.…
3May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedFixing the Financial System
How does your organization review and achieve accountability for management’s actions? For fiscal accountability? For transparency in your operations? For protection of stakeholder and stockholder interests?
If every financial institution in the U.S. had been forced to answer these Baldrige questions honestly and accurately in the past few years, and if regulators had been verifying their responses, the financial crisis and the bailout it triggered could have been averted. Either they would have had processes in place to deliver ethical and effective leadership or their irresponsible practices would have been exposed.
“I think the last two years have revealed the single largest failure of senior management in the financial sector, and of the board system in American history,” wrote Bo Cutter in new deal 2.0 (November 24, 2009). Cutter has been a managing director of Warburg Pincus, a global private equity firm, and led President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget transition team. Considering the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s and 1990s and the scandals involving Enron and Worldcomm earlier this decade, one could argue that senior management and boards of directors in the financial sector have been failing miserably for thirty years. One could also make the case that the…
4Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
