BLOGRIGE

Can You Count to Ten?

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

The Baldrige Cheermudgeon is back from a wonderful vacation in Glacier National Park and Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada. While the east coast of the United States was sweltering in 100 degree heat, we enjoyed the cool comfort of the Rocky Mountains. Yes, I did leave a few blog postings behind, so those who read Blogrige probably didn't know I was away.

But what does this have to do with counting to ten? I had the opportunity to do just that several times and several ways on our flight home. (If only we could convince airlines to use the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence....Customer Focus, Process Management.) Let's start with luggage. In the old days (five or so years ago) two pieces of luggage could be checked for free; then it became one piece; now $25 for the first piece, with a strict weight limit. Not only do you pay, but we experienced long lines while they weighed each piece for the exactly 50 pound limit and made everyone else wait. Count to ten! Nobody paid an overweight fee that I saw, but we waited while bags were repacked, weight redistributed, underwear and dirty laundry flying, heavy jackets put on, lines backed up..customer focus or harassment?

There are no direct flights from Calgary or Spokane to Washington, DC, so we had to connect through a hub. We landed at C8, 1 1/2 hour layover, but C11 was our next flight. I had a good book and settled in. I just got comfortable when they moved our flight to D10. C and D concourses are a mile and a half apart (OK, I exaggerate). Count to ten! We move and settle in. Flight has mechanical problems, another 1 1/2 hour delay. Oh and now gate C8. Count to ten! At least the delay provided us our daily exercise. Another delay, one hour. We are given a $6 voucher for lunch. You can hardly get a drink and chips for $6 in an airport. But we had already eaten anyway.

Leave after a four hour delay. We are each promised a $200 travel voucher as a thank you for our patience..customer focus/service recovery. Once on the plane, they start distributing vouchers from the front and back of the plane. We were in the middle, exit row. You guessed it. Remember counting to ten. The airline failed...ten vouchers short. Didn't they know how many people were on the plane?...process management. "You will get your vouchers in DC." We did, but only after having to wait in line for them to be printed. They couldn't send a message ahead of our arrival?

So, for the Baldrige geeks among the readers of this posting, who are always asking about core competencies, I would assert  this airline has core competencies in customer frustration and customer service recovery. Are there better ways to achieve customer focus and engagement? What do you think?

Putting Employee Safety First

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

 

Can a CEO who puts employee safety first still operate a sustainable and profitable organization? The National Safety Council says absolutely!

"When leaders value safety, engage with employees, and implement best practices, they are able to produce successful and profitable workplaces," says Janet Froetscher, President and CEO of the National Safety Council, which recognizes executives who understand "the significance of safety to their operations and corporate sustainability." These CEOs "realize that engaging employees in a company culture of safety builds a strong network of people who care about one another and their performance on the job."

Robert McGough, CEO of DynMcDermott Petroleum Operations, has been named to the council's 2010 list of CEOs who have made distinguished contributions to the safety and health of their employees, their employees' families, and their corporate communities. DynMcDermott, which is the longest-running management and operations contractor of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), received the Baldrige Award in 2005. As part of its application, DynMcDermott responded to the Criteria for Performance Excellence regarding the safety requirements of its workforce, safety regulations, safety as an indicator to improve workforce engagement, and workforce-related occupational health and safety results.

More than just words on paper, DynMcDermott demonstrated its safety management and operational readiness when both Hurricanes Katrina and Rita crashed into its sites in 2005. When the first hurricane struck, DynMcDermott relocated its operations from New Orleans to Beaumont, Texas. Just one month later, the second hurricane forced another evacuation and relocation to a second planned alternate site.

Yet, less than five days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, DynMcDermott restored its operations. During this period, President George W. Bush declared a drawdown from the SPR, an action that has occurred only twice in 30 years. Although the Emergency Operation Center had to be relocated over 200 miles away, DynMcDermott made its first drawdown oil delivery just three days after Hurricane Rita.

Congratulations, Mr. McGough, for demonstrating that a successful, sustainable organization can make safety (and agility!) a top priority.

Introducing the 2010 Baldrige Fellows!

Posted by Bob Fangmeyer

"The Baldrige Fellows Program is the only executive leadership fellowship that provides one-on-one access to Baldrige Award recipients and the opportunity to learn role model management strategies from these high-performing executives. Your participation in this program will benefit you personally, your organization, and your organization’s key stakeholders—employees, customers, suppliers, and the larger community. Now is a perfect time for executives with vision and foresight to understand and apply the Baldrige concepts as a means to improving their organization and its sustainability". 

The above excerpt from the congratulations letter sent to the first ever class of the Baldrige Fellows by Gary Locke, Secretary of Commerce makes it clear why we are so excited about this new program.

The Baldrige Fellows is a senior executive development program centered on forming relationships with and learning from Baldrige Award Recipient organizations and their senior executives. The activities of the Baldrige Fellows Program are designed to accelerate the executive development of participants through exploration and application of the Baldrige framework, the Criteria for Performance Excellence, and the impact of systems thinking on organizations. To help translate lessons into actions for their organizations, Baldrige Fellows are paired with mentors who are senior executives from a Baldrige affiliated organization. They also have numerous opportunities to network with and learn from each other.

The first Baldrige Fellows are: Wayne Foraker, senior director office of institutional assessment, University of Phoenix, Phoenix, Az.; William Griffin, vice president marketing, North America, AGCO Corp., Duluth, Ga.; Donald Haag, vice president Mid-West area, Packaging Corporation of America, Lake Forest, Ill.; Robert Hagans, chief financial officer, American Association for Retired Persons, Washington, D.C.; Ziad Haydar, vice president for clinical excellence and physician integration, Ascension Health, St. Louis, Mo.; John McCarville, senior vice president global supply chain and information technology, Griffith Laboratories, Alsip, Ill.; Margaret McGoldrick, executive vice president and chief operating officer, Abington Memorial Hospital, Abington, Pa.; James Metcalf, president and chief operating officer, USG Corp., Chicago, Ill; Brad Mitchell, president, global logistics and distribution, UPS, Atlanta, Ga.; Monty Pooley, president North America retail, Sara Lee Corp., Downers Grove, Ill.; John Smith, global product director for propylene oxide/propylene glycol (PO/PG), Dow Chemical Co.; Troy Villarreal, chief executive officer, The Medical Center of Plano, HCA Corp., Plano, Tx; Russell Williams, director of quality, Baldor Electric Co., Greenville, S.C.; and Michael Woronka, chief executive officer, Action Ambulance Service, Wilmington, Mass.

The next class of Baldrige Fellows will begin in April 2012. For more information on the Baldrige Fellows Program, you may contact me at robert.fangmeyer@nist.gov or visit our website.

Corporate DNA: Is There a Litmus Test?

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

For a person, DNA testing is scientific and pretty irrefutable. You cannot hide from the evidence. But what about a corporation? Is there a litmus test for corporate DNA?

I'll get back to that before I finish, but let's start by exploring the concept and how I got to the question. The term seems to have been around several decades now. It has been defined in BuzzWhack (buzzword dictionary) as:

A company's core values, culture, personality, etc., that supposedly gets passed along to all new employees. Corporate DNA, however, is actually altered slightly every time a new person is hired. And a wholesale shift can occur by simply replacing the CEO.

So, it is not nearly as definitive as biological DNA. And I have seen it change through mergers, acquisitions, and, as stated above, through CEO changes. As a matter of fact, these mechanisms have resulted in organizations adopting or dropping Baldrige Criteria use, with subsequent significant cultural shifts, i.e. corporate DNA changes.

Which is what led me to this musing. As we prepare for the 2011-2012 revisions to the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, I wondered can we write a set of questions that serve as a litmus test for an organization's DNA? And I think we can come pretty close. I would submit that in the current Criteria, Items 1.1 (Senior Leadership), 1.2 (Governance and Societal Responsibilities) and 7.6 (Leadership Outcomes) define your organization's DNA pretty well. I plan on using the DNA concept as we further refine these Items for 2011-2012.

And by the way, very close in alphabetical order to corporate DNA in BuzzWhack are the terms corporate anorexia and corporate antibodies. Check them out! But those are the potential subjects for future blogs, unless you want to comment now.

And, by the way, what is your organization's DNA?

The Chicken or the Egg; Self-Assessment, Feedback, or the Award?

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

This year, 83 organizations applied for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation's highest honor for performance excellence. They used the Criteria for Performance Excellence as the basis for their Award applications.

But in the last 12 months the Criteria for Performance Excellence have been downloaded from the Baldrige Program Web site more than 2 million times, with an additional 100,000 copies of the Criteria printed each year.

So where are the one million, nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine thousand, nine-hundred-and-seventeen additional Award applications? Are organizations using the Criteria just to apply for the Baldrige Award or for other purposes?

Of course, the Criteria for Performance Excellence—a set of performance expectations that drive organizational success—are used by the majority for self-assessment. Many organizations use them as a validated management tool. Some draw on the Criteria to find gaps in their processes or to determine how well they are doing in meeting goals and getting results before ever applying for the Award.

After self-assessing, some organizations then choose to apply for Baldrige-based state or local quality awards and then nationally. But what is the real value of such an application?

To answer this question, I need only look to Baldrige Award recipients. Many have said that only after they stopped focusing on receiving the Award—only after the tenets of the Baldrige Criteria were ingrained in their cultures—did the Award come.

"There was a perception among employees and physicians that this was just one more award . . . and motivation dropped when we found out that we were not a recipient," said Rulon Stacey, CEO of Award recipient Poudre Valley Health System. "For us, it was so much more motivational to [use the Criteria] to engage our workforce in providing world-class care, instead of asking for their help to win another award."

Earnest Davenport, former Chairman and CEO of Eastman Chemical Company, a 1993 Baldrige Award recipient, said, "We didn't apply the [Baldrige] concepts . . . to win an award. We did it to win customers. We did it to grow. We did it to prosper."

"We applied for the Award, not with the idea of winning, but with the goal of receiving the evaluation of the Baldrige Examiners . . . perhaps the most cost-effective, value-added business consultation available anywhere in the world today,"said Bob Barnett, former President of Motorola Commercial, Government & Industrial Solutions Sector (CGISS), a 2002 Baldrige Award recipient.

"When we began applying the Baldrige principles to our business . . . we achieved significant improvements in business performance, both in increased productivity and reduced cycle time, enabled by a cultural transformation," said E. David Spong, former Vice President and General Manager of Boeing Airlift and Tanker Programs, a 1998 Baldrige Award recipient, and former President of Boeing Aerospace Support, a 2003 Baldrige Award recipient.

Dr. Terry Holliday, former Superintendent of Iredell-Statesville Schools, a 2008 Baldrige Award recipient, said, "If you get into Baldrige because of the Award, it'll be a short journey. But if you get into it for the right reasons, the feedback and continuous improvement, then it's well worth the journey."

So whatever reason your organization decides to explore the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence—to self-assess, to receive feedback to improve, or to apply for the Baldrige Award—it will be a business decision that is right for your organization. You decide which comes first: the chicken or the egg.

(For more information on self-assessment using the Criteria for Performance Excellence, see the PowerPoint presentations on the Baldrige Web site. Also, visit the Alliance for Performance Excellence to learn more about state and local quality resources and awards.)

 

 

 

Pursuing the Holy Grail of Classroom Instruction

Posted by Jeff Lucas

One of the most intractable problems in public education has long been optimizing the instructional process for individual students.  There has been a lot of talk (and a lot of largely unfounded claims) regarding "differentiated instruction", but the reality is when you are standing in front of a class of 25-30 students truly customizing a learning environment for each individual is just not possible. And I mean customizing across all the important dimensions -- learning styles, prior knowledge, interests and talents, family and cultural background, etc. -- not just using some visual, auditory, and tactile content in a lesson (certainly good, but also certainly not sufficient).

Well, I came home last evening to find my wife listening to the Freakonomics Radio podcast and she asked "What do you think about this School of One project?"  As someone who prides himself on being up to date on innovations in education I tried my all-purpose Baldrige answer "Well, it depends," but it was pretty obvious I was bluffing.  So, today I decided I had to get up to speed on this immediately.

Turns out I am a bit late to the party and there are plenty of good resources out there including an excellent piece in this month's Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates, as well as Time Magazine's selection of School of One as one of the Top 50 Inventions for 2009. The basic model is to break out of the assumption in my first paragraph above --" standing in front of a class of 25-30 students".  Sophisticated use of technology, along with access to a large bank of validated learning experiences, allows each student to receive a unique learning plan EACH DAY!  The plan takes into account virtually all of the key dimensions I mentioned above and might intersperse periods of individual research with periods of small group problem solving and then move on to one to one virtual mentoring with someone halfway across the country. Obviously, there is lot more to the model than I can go into in this post and I urge you to check out the School of One site.  Fortunately, the New York City Department of Education is taking this slowly in an effort to ensure it is sustainable.  They are starting with just the math program and Chancellor Joel Klein has required that subsequent deployment to any school not increase the overall budget.  But, as laptops become a commodity and development of instructional packages through crowd sourcing becomes a reality this may well be doable. 

Baldrige connections you ask?  Well for starters this is a powerful example of someone who understands why the Education Criteria for Performance Excellence results item 7.1 is "Student Learning" not "Student Achievement".  School of One focuses on meeting each student where they currently are -- and not just academically but also socially, behaviorally, and attitudinally -- and then designing a systematic instruction process to take them where they need to be.   It seems to be exactly what Terry Holliday, late of Iredell-Statesville Schools (2008 Baldrige Recipient) and now Kentucky Commissioner of Education, means when refers to moving to a student-centered view of education.  Then there's the Visionary Leadership, Managing for Innovation, Focus on Results and Creating Value . . . 

Can One Superstar Carry a Team?

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

How did I come to this question? Those of us who live in the Washington, DC area have been enchanted by the Washington Nationals new pitching phenom Stephen Strasburg. But can a phenom carry a team? Unfortunately, the simple answer is "no." As of the end of June, the Nationals had lost five in row, 6 of 19 since Stephen Strasburg debuted. But can a new, energetic superstar engage the rest of the team and your customers? If Strasburg is the prototype, the simple answer is "yes."

I think the analogy is a good one for many of us and our teams at work. Can one member carry the whole team? In a word "no." Can one dedicated, energetic, inspirational person energize a team? In a word "yes." Can a visionary leader engage an organization? In a word "yes."

One clear characteristic of Baldrige Award recipients is the power of visionary leaders. Look at what some of them have to say about Baldrige and their journeys. And what do they agree about? Their success and their organizations' success is attributable to the great team of colleagues who bring their minds, hearts, and hands to the workplace. That's why studies show that customer engagement correlates with workforce engagement. Are you interested in knowing what your employees think about your leadership and organization. There is a great Baldrige-based survey tool for you to use, Are We Making Progress?. Try it!

Also, please share your experiences with workforce and customer engagement and tell me about visionary leaders you know.

Taking Lean to the Restroom Is Going too Far!

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

OK, I have been cheering a good bit lately; it is time to remember that I am also a "mudgeon." We are looking critically at key processes in the Baldrige Program for opportunities to "lean" them out. As you might imagine, I am a big proponent of process improvement and process simplification and lean is a great tool in process improvement, process simplification, and waste reduction. The Process Management Category of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence places great importance on continuous improvement, learning, and innovation. But there are times when lean can be misapplied or inappropriately applied and lead to unintended consequences, that are neither improvements nor beneficial innovation.

This takes me to some recent efforts to save energy, be more green, and reduce waste at our organization. It started with more efficient lighting and employees pre-separating recyclables to avoid rework. There were other processes and more improvements. They were all good. But recently, it has "gone down the toilet," almost literally. We re-engineered the dispensing of soap and paper towels in the restrooms.

In the new towel dispensers, you pull on the paper towel and a metered length of towel is released. In concept, reducing waste (metered length) and reducing opportunity for germ transmission, since you touch only your towel (innovation). However, the metered length is enough towel for only a child with small hands and the towel itself (less expensive material) falls apart when you pull on it with wet hands. The result is you always need two towels  (introducing waste) and you frequently have to go fishing in the dispenser for the rest of the towel after it falls apart and doesn't trigger the release of the next towel. And I would conjecture that the inside of the dispenser slot is rarely cleaned (source of germs).

So what went wrong, if lean is good? One, the new dispenser and towels did not fully address customer requirements and two, the paper was judged on price and not matched to what should have been well-identified specifications. There probably were other failures as well. So what is my take-away lesson: lean haphazardly applied, in absence of a focus on all customer requirements and the work system in which a process operates can easily lead to process non-improvements. The Baldrige Criteria glossary defines customer engagement, work system and work process and the critical relationships among the three.

Do you have examples of failures in the use of quality tools because they were used inappropriately, ignoring the system in which an improvement must operate? Now, you'll have to excuse me while I seek an old-fashioned towel. And don't get me started on the automatic faucets that don't turn on when you need them!

Talking Accreditation and Baldrige in the City of Angels

Posted by Jeff Lucas

Ellen Garshick of our Publications Management Team and I spent last week at the Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP) annual conference in Los Angeles.

[Okay, first off I must digress and point out that the amount of stuff going on in Los Angeles is completely insane.  We were exhibiting in the brand new J.W. Marriott hotel and were surrounded on three sides by:  the NHL Draft; the LA Film Festival; and the Electric Daisy Carnival .  I don't think I could survive the pace of living there.]

Our relationship with ACBSP appears to be a great one for both parties.  The accreditation standards utilized for both two and four year business programs draw heavily on the Baldrige Criteria in both their approach and content.  ACBSP has done a really nice job of customizing the standards in areas where there are obvious specific requirements that a quality business program would have to address.  

A couple of thoughts occurred to Ellen and me as we talked with attendees at both our booth and workshop.  First, any ACBSP school or program that has completed their self-study (one of the interim steps in achieving accreditation) already has the vast majority of what would be required to submit an application for most of the lower tiers in our state quality programs. They would certainly benefit from feedback prior to their eventual evaluation visit and might also provide a source of examiners with a vested interest in getting a deeper understanding of the Criteria.  A list of member institutions is available here in case anyone is interested.  

Second, our conversations turned up about half a dozen other organizations that do accreditation or certification that appears to be "Baldrige-based."  This is an area we would love to get a better handle on.  If you are aware of such an organization, could you let us know by posting a comment (or a direct email - jeff.lucas@nist.gov)?

Congratulations to ACBSP Executive Director Doug Viehland and his staff for putting on an excellent event, and special thanks to John and Tina Shoemaker (Baldrige Ambassadors extraordinaire) for their help with the swarms at the booth. 

Validated Around the World

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey

 

Recently, the Ukrainian Association for Quality requested permission to translate the Criteria for Performance Excellence into Ukrainian and Russian. We also recently received completed Japanese translations of the Criteria booklets from the Japan Quality Award. In fact, as of January 2010, 80 international quality/performance excellence awards either use the Baldrige Criteria or a derivative of it.

If you ever wonder if the Baldrige Criteria really represent validated management practices—not only in the United States but around the world—I'd answer with an astounding yes!

Some countries/awards that use the Criteria for Performance Excellence are Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Thailand, Sweden, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. Some countries that use a derivative of the Criteria are Egypt, China, Mongolia, India, Nepal, Vietnam, Iceland, Ireland, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Indeed, the Baldrige Criteria have become accepted as a worldwide standard for performance excellence, truly a proven framework and a global benchmark!

A note on the Japanese translation of the Criteria: I expected questions from the translator on cultural explanations that might be needed to describe some of the management practices and core values and concepts. But the only questions we received came from translating the Education Criteria for Performance Excellence and the differences between our school systems; for example, explaining what we meant in the United States by "feeder schools" that prepared students for higher education.

I would say that the worldwide adoption of the Criteria and their principles is a good indication that they are validated and relevant for organizations in any country!