BLOGRIGE

I Am Really Trying to Pay My Taxes

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

All that resonated in my mind this weekend was the old Beatles' tune, "Taxman". Not because of the Beatles' theme about paying too much in taxes, but because I recall one of the U.S. tax preparation companies subsequently using it for their advertisement to prepare your taxes. And I needed help this past weekend (another Beatles' song...."Help, I need somebody..."). I was tearing out the few hairs I still have. But, I digress, this is not about the Beatles or hair restoration. It is about tax preparation software.

I was busy at my computer this past Saturday, filling out my tax return (who's returning what anyway?), when it all went wrong. I had downloaded my W-2 from the government and my interest income from the bank into the tax application and had entered my credit union interest income, and now moved to the next section and was entering data. All of a sudden, I noticed the numbers changing in the tax status window. You know, the window where it tells you how much you owe or are being refunded at this point. Decreasing without me having hit enter for any new data. So, I went to the tax summary page and noticed that my bank interest income was gone. I re-downloaded and re-entered it and saved the return. I went back to the section I was working on and a few seconds later...bam...it was gone again. I exited the program and tried again...bam... I rebooted the computer and tried again...bam...  Round 1 of tearing hair out.

I went to the on-line help area and "chatted" with their support person. I rapidly determined that she was only a data base that triggered on keywords in my query. No help! I finally found their "live" on-line help. After waiting it seemed an hour (it wasn't), I gave up and fortunately was rescued for the rest of the day by a dinner engagement.

I got up early the next morning and called the software company's 800 number help line. They only open at 8 or 9 AM Pacific time. I was way too early. Tear more hair out!

I finally realized this can't be happening to everyone, or there would have been a fix by now. So the only obvious variables were the two sources from which I downloaded information. So, I entered everything manually and...no bam...it worked.

I told the story to my computer scientist son and he speculated about a database download resulting in a check-sum error, that led to the data being erased. Sure, but I just want to file my taxes by April 15th!

So, what does this have to do with Baldrige? Have the software gurus at any of these companies read Category 4 of the Baldrige Criteria, "Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management"?  How do they ensure that software is reliable, secure, and user-friendly? How do they ensure data accuracy and reliability? And, most of all, how do they protect poor users like me from filing inaccurate returns? Now I wonder about the errors in the software that I don't catch, because they are buried in computations!

What are your software application or database stories? Would use of the Baldrige Criteria help your vendors? This has been a long blog entry, but I feel better now!

Interact with Authors at Quest XXII

Posted by Pamela Wong

Another reason to register for the Baldrige Program's Quest for Excellence XXII, April 12-14, in Washington, D.C.:  you’ll have the opportunity to interact with authors of some of the latest books on performance excellence.

Quest currently has book signings and Q&A sessions scheduled with the following authors from ASQ Press:

· Running All the Red Lights by Terry Holliday, former superintendent, and Brenda Clark, current associate superintendent of learning, from the Iredell-Statesville (N.C.) school district, the 2008 Baldrige Award Recipient for Education. New release.

· ASQ Education School Self-Assessment Guide to Performance Excellence by Peter G. LaBonte helps you align your school or district to world-class education standards. New release.

· The Baldrige User’s Guide by John Vinyard and John Latham, for diagnosing your organization, designing or redesigning systems, or leading transformation; this practical guide has the tools you need.

· Journey to Excellence: How Baldrige Health Care Leaders Succeed, Kathleen J. Goonan, MD, Joseph A. Muzikowski, and Patricia K. Stoltz, based on several years study of nine Baldrige Award recipients, it describes what other health care leaders could do to reap similar results.

What Has 1,108 Rows, 149 Columns and More Chances to Create a Pivot Table Than You Can Shake a Stick At?

Posted by Jeff Lucas

Why it's the Baldrige Blinded Applicant Scoring Data of course.  Just released last Friday was the second data set that now contains item level scores for every single applicant to the Baldrige National Quality Award between 1990 and 2006.  We have made the data anonymous (hence the "Blinded", in case you were thinking it only represented applicants experiencing visual challenges when they submitted) and hope that this new set will provide even more fertile ground for analysis and research.

A few fun facts from my limited time spent manipulating the spreadsheet:

• Largest point increase from Independent Review to Consensus Review = 89 points (an applicant in 2005)
• Largest point decline from Independent Review to Consensus Review = 190 points (an applicant in 2006)
• Most frequent score obtained during Independent Review = 437 (N = 8)
• Some scores never given during Independent Review = 419, 468, 486 (play these numbers tonight!)

Obviously, these are pretty trivial data, but then again my skill set with Excel starts to get pretty thin after sorting and "Count If".  I think we are counting on all of you clever analytical types out there to help us turn this data into knowledge.  

One caveat would be to read the FAQs that we have prepared to accompany this data set.  It outlines some of the changes that have taken place in both the Baldrige Criteria and Award Process over time that are important in interpreting the data accurately.

If you are looking for some more information on the Blinded Scoring Data and would like to have a conversation with someone who knows ANOVA was not a Chevy product from the 60s and 70s, contact Cristin Conner on our staff. She is someone who really knows her way around a spreadsheet and would be happy to answer questions.

It's That Customer Thing (Again)

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

So, yesterday I went shopping and my credit card was not accepted. I paid with a different card and noted that I had to call the bank and find out what this was about. To my pleasant surprise, before I could even call the bank, I had both a voice mail and an e-mail from the bank saying there was a hold on my account because of suspected fraudulent use of the card. I was impressed by the customer focus! I was given a web site to check my recent purchases and see if they were all mine. Now the fun begins...I went to the web site and couldn't log in. A little annoyed, I called the 800 number listed on the web site. I was told that they were experiencing heavy call volume and it would be up to six minutes until an agent responded.  Twenty minutes later, a not cheery me was connected to a cheery agent.(I guess this had something to do with the recent switch to DST and so their clocks were not working properly.)  But, I reminded myself that they had actually done me a favor with a potential fraud alert. The customer agent reviewed my recent charges and all of them were mine. He was "perplexed" since none of them were out of my normal usage pattern. I then told him that I also couldn't access my account on the web. The bulb lit, "Oh yes, we have been doing some minor reprogramming of our computers and it has caused an inconvenience for some customers. Your account is now fine." Fine? By whose standards?

Did you know that MSN Money actually has an annual Customer Hall of Shame? And did you know that in the most recent survey 4 of the top 10 spots were held by financial services institutions? And did you also know that financial services companies went from 40% to 65% more dissatisfied than satisfied customers in the last year? And did you know that they were joined in the top 10 by two cable companies and two telephone companies? What a surprise! And did you know that the Baldrige Quest for Excellence conference could give all these companies great lessons, in person or virtually, from American role models that know how to deliver great customer service?

Are you surprised by the organizations populating this top ten list? Would you like to teach these companies a lesson or two? Would teaching them a lesson about customer focus be a hard thing to do? Do they know that numerous studies have shown that it costs five to ten times as much to acquire a new customer versus retaining an existing one and engaging them for the long-term? That is why the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence focus on customer engagement. I need to go calm down!

More Proof that "Core Competencies" are King!

Posted by Bob Hunt

An article in IndustryWeek's Continuous Improvement newsletter (requires free registration to view)  by Jill Jusko posted March 16, 2010 cites work by Chris Zook and James Allen, senior partners at Bain & Co. and co-authors of Profit from the Core: A Return to Growth in Turbulent Times. This work makes the case for organizations investing resources to take advantage of their strengths as opposed to shoring up weaknesses.  Jusko says that the 2001 book recently was re-released with findings from a 10-year study by Bain of more than 2,000 companies.

The authors state that one of the key principles for organizational success is:

"Have a well-defined business core and understand how you have made it work for you."  According to Jusko, the authors say that the "business core" involves not only the organization's primary product or service, but can include four to seven assets that may include such intangibles as brand and talent.   Now, doesn't the "business core" as these authors call it sound a whole lot like the definition of "core competencies"  contained in the glossary of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence? In recent years, the Baldrige Program has placed more emphasis on the importance of core competencies to organizations - defining them, understanding them, integrating them into the strategic planning process, building work systems to leverage them, and measuring success against them. 

Zook and Allen have found more proof that organizations who leverage their "business core" are among the most successful.  Hmmm. Maybe I should go buy this book!

Do you have a success story to share about the successful application of core competencies in your organization?  Inquiring minds want to know!

Parents as Partners in the Public School

Posted by Pamela Wong

It’s hard for me to believe: my youngest will graduate from high school this coming June. This will end our family’s 19 years of public school enrollment. What will I do with my time, with no more attending PTSA meetings, volunteering at school activities, or cheering at sports or academic events?

I appreciate that the administrations and staffs of the schools my children attended, elementary through high school, regarded parents as partners in their children’s education. These schools recognized that parental involvement increases their children’s achievement. They didn’t see parents in the schools as a bother or interference, as did a college friend of mine, who teaches middle school in another state.

Iredell-Statesville Schools (ISS) in Statesville, North Carolina, which received the Baldrige Award in 2008, illustrates the worth of strong family support. In fact, ISS makes strong family, community, and business support a strategic priority, and partnerships and teamwork a value. And ISS’s results show the benefits.

ISS’s volunteer hours have surpassed its goals in four academic years, beginning in 2003–2004. During this time period, volunteer hours grew from 40,000 districtwide to more than 180,000, a value of $741,914! (Check out the Results section here.) During these times of falling tax revenue and tight budgets, those hours are more valuable than ever.

ISS is also working to increase the number of parents who attend their children’s school-related conferences. The school system set an ambitious goal of 100 percent of parents attending two or more of these conferences annually. By the 2006–2007 school year, results showed that about 97 percent of parents had achieved this goal! And this is compared to less than 70 percent nationally, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Even though I will no longer be a public school parent, I look forward to staying involved as a community member. Through NIST’s Adopt-a-School program, I read weekly with a kindergartner named Mohamed, helping to develop his skills in English.  

Do you have any examples of how schools are developing partnerships with parents, the community, and other stakeholders?

Teaching and Leading and Leading and Teaching

Posted by Jeff Lucas

New book out by Teach for America VP for Knowledge Development and Public Engagement, Steven Farr (don't you love the fact that an education organization has a VP for public engagement and understands managing knowledge is important?  But I digress . . .), entitled Teaching as Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher's Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap.  Back in January, Atlantic Monthly published an interview with Farr that previewed the book and the more than 20 years of data that now exists from TFA on what makes for a highly effective teacher.  TFA has been collecting extensive data sets on their teachers since their inception, and the fact that they are not a traditional school district with traditional work agreements with their participants has allowed for a deep dive into what characteristics and professional practices contribute to student learning.

There is a lot to like in their findings from a Baldrige perspective.  Farr's book describes six principles that a teacher seeking to be a leader in the classroom and the school can put into practice.  The first is: Set Big Goals.  The TFA has explicitly embraced the idea of BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals), a Jim Collins and Jerry Porras concept well known to us Baldrige geeks from the work of recipients such as Premier, Inc. and Park Place Lexus.  Other principles include: Plan Purposefully, Execute Effectively, and Continuously Increase Effectiveness.  Sounds like TFA is advocating that teachers embed a Shewart Cycle in the service of reflective practice.  Personally, I have long held that the path to increasing the impact of a systems perspective on performance excellence (read, "more Baldrige") in schools, had to run through Superintendents, or at least school leaders.  A cadre of professionals engaged in thoughtful reflective practice in the classroom, such as that which TFA seems to be recommending, might be the "bottom up" ground swell to complement visionary "top down" leadership that we have seen in high performing organizations.  I knew there was a reason I had a professional crush on Wendy Kopp. 

And now the rest of the story . . . the Gates Foundation teamed up with Scholastic/Harris Interactive to survey 40,000 public school teachers (WaPo Story here).  Among the more interesting findings was that the factor with the highest rating for being "absolutely essential" to retaining teachers was supportive leadership at 68% (trailed by higher pay at 45% and performance pay at 8%).  No drill down on what "supportive leadership" would mean, but at the very least it points to the relationship aspect trumping the more mundane incentive motive that has been receiving a lot of attention.  

So, the teaching/leading nexus seems to be where it's at.  Teachers need it to address achievement gaps and Leaders need it to address teacher retention.  Seems like maybe the Criteria got it right when they made it Category 1. 

Customer Engagement Matters: the Toyota Example

Posted by Zara Brunner

Are you surprised that Toyota owners have not budged in their loyalty to and satisfaction with the company?  According to recent survey results by Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business, while 8 million Toyota vehicles have been recalled since October, customers rated 8 out of 10 that they would consider making a future repeat purchase from Toyota (compared to other auto companies' ratings average at 4).

These same customers agreed more strongly than other car company customers that:

• Toyota appropriately handled issues with the brake-pedal recall
• This incident is an outlier
• Toyota typically has a strong reputation for quality
• The recall shows Toyota's commitment to customer safety

This is a great example of customer engagement.  The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence defines customer engagement as "your customers' investment in your brand and product offerings.  Characteristics of engagement include customer retention and loyalty, customers' willingness to make an effort to do business - and to increase business - with your organization..."

Make no mistakes it's hurt their reputation and sales--as described in the March 9 Daily Markets.  But Toyota developed the TPS with a strong focus on the customer, as these survey results indicate.  The Baldrige Criteria suggest using the information on customers' requirements, expectations, and satisfaction, along with robust performance improvement and customer complaint management processes, to improve the organization's product offerings and enhance customer engagement.  Why? Because clearly customer engagement matters and can help an organization thrive -- and rebound.

The Frustration of a Couch Coach

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

So, I'll admit it, I am a die-hard Washington Redskins football fan. Even through this spell of lean years, and it has been a long one, I have suffered through the losses and the frequent coaching changes ever the loyal fan. So now I am getting ready for another year of training camp with another new coaching staff and just having cut many of our best known veteran players.

Now I would be the first to agree that these veterans, while good, did not always perform well or seem to be acting like "team players". And we did have an "old" team by NFL standards. But we did also retain (I won't single any players out) at least one high-profile veteran that fits all the characteristics of those cut. So, I wonder, is there a clear HR plan that is being executed here? Does it derive from a yet unshared (not that I am in a position to demand sharing) strategic plan? Are the new free agency changes behind the decisions? Is capitalizing on free agency part of an agile and real strategic plan developed by the new brain trust? Is there innovation or a breakthrough improvement in the offing? A new off-season and hope springs eternal for this football fan!

And how do you do effective strategic planning with a "one-man" board of directors and constantly changing senior leadership? How do you make sure you aren't missing blind spots? Do NFL teams do SWOT analyses? Could they benefit from using the Strategic Planning questions in the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence?

What about your favorite sports teams? What about the organization that controls your livelihood? My head hurts -- too much to ponder late in the day!

Three Cheers for Three Stars

Posted by Jeff Lucas

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the Excellence in Tennessee Conference last week in Franklin, TN. If any of you follow my Twitter stream you have already seen some of my updates during the keynote sessions. Katie Rawls and her staff at TNCPE put on an excellent event and my biggest problem is deciding what to report on. 

One possibility would be the AM keynote by Terry Holliday, former Superintendent of Iredell-Statesville Schools and currently the Commissioner of Education for the State of Kentucky. Terry took time off from shepherding his state's Race to the Top application through the process to tell the story of Igniting a Passion for Learning. I have always seen Terry as one of the most compelling leaders in our education sector, but as time goes on his message becomes more and more powerful for every sector of our economy. 

A second possibility would be the lunchtime keynote by Brad Thacker, Vice President Corporate Services and Organizational Development for Nissan North America. Brad's presentation told the story of how NNA has been able to make the shift from managing through a crisis to leading through a crisis, at a time when the organization's very existence was called into question for the first time in their history. In terms of corporate transparency when the chips are really on the table, it was a real role model example. 

But I think what I want to talk about is the Three Star Program. This is a partnership between TNCPE and the state Department of Economic and Community Development. For the past three years, these two entities have shared resources in order to provide local communities with coaching and assessment services centered on implementation of the Criteria for Performance Excellence. The goal is to make these communities more attractive locales for attracting new businesses and providing their citizens with a stronger community, a more diverse economy, and expanded job opportunities. At the evening's Award Banquet, six new communities achieved level one status, bringing the total to 15 by my count. Presenting all of the awards that evening was Matthew Kisber, Commissioner of Economic and Community Development for the state. He has been the guiding force behind this partnership and took the opportunity to announce a $100K grant to TNCPE to continue the work, as well as news that the partnership had received the 2010 Innovator Award from the Southern Growth Policies Board. 

So if you have an interest in expanding the services of your state quality program, improving the performance of your state economic development agency, or just want to live in an excellent community, take a look at what the Three Star Program is accomplishing in Tennessee. 

Teaser: Another benefit of attending the TNCPE event was reacquainting with some long time friends of Baldrige and it will be the basis of another post coming soon . . . let's just say that if you like sweet tea, you will want to stay tuned.