BLOGRIGE

'Brevity is the Soul of Wit' and Maybe Mission?

Posted by Jeff Lucas

Eric Hellweg of Editor of HBR.org is attending the PopTech Conference in Camden, Maine and has a great blog post about a session by Kevin Starr of the Mulago Foundation.   Starr applies Polonius's prescription to the mission statements of the socially-conscious businesses that Mulago looks to fund.  In fact, he requires that they be no more than eight words in length and follow this formula:  verb + target + outcome.  Hellweg relates some examples provided which include:  "Save endangered species from extinction" and "Improve African children's health."

Now these may not be as elegant as some of those six-word memoirs that continue to be popular (I digress, but I continue to be amazed at what great stuff people come up with in this format on an almost daily basis.  Two recent ones:  "Photographic memory; running out of film" and "Like Beer, like brownies, hate diabetes").  But I am guessing that they will provide your workforce with a clearer picture of what you want them to focus on and be more likely to be remembered than those that sound like they were created by Dilbert's automatic mission statement generator.  For example, our challenge is to assertively network economically sound methods of empowerment so that we continually negotiate performance-based infrastructures.

So, can you get your organization's mission down to eight meaningful and compelling words?  I'll give ours a try.  Baldrige:  "Improving US organizations' performance."  We usually add in competitiveness because it is in our establishing legislation, but I think our current definition of performance probably covers that too.  What might yours look like?

Baseball, Diversity, and Strategic Advantages

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

I must admit, I don't pay much attention to Major League Baseball (MLB) throughout the season. I do check to see how my Red Sox are doing, and at least they spoiled the home field advantage for the Yankees this year. But I don't watch much baseball all summer. When playoff time comes, I do get more involved and watch some games, if only to root for whoever is playing the Yankees (and I guess my cheering succeeded). But what does this have to do with diversity and strategic advantages, you ask?

It all stems from a recent HBR blog on Major League Baseball's strategic approach to diversity. In the posting Roger Crockett states, "Baseball understands what corporate America typically doesn't. Diversity in business is a strategic advantage (my emphasis added)." Seventeen percent of the team managers are people of color. White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf says, "When it comes to hiring if you open it up to the whole world you are going to get more qualified people, if you limit hiring to white males you shrink the pool of people." MLB believes this statement so strongly that since 1999 each managerial vacancy includes interviewing at least one person of color.

In August, 2010 U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, the only Hispanic senator, released a study of 219 corporations on the Fortune 500 list and 71 of the Fortune 100 companies. Hispanics comprise 3.28% of board members and 2.90% of executive teams. They are 15% of the U.S. population. Women comprise 18.04% of board members and 19.87% of executive teams, far less than their percentage of the population. 

The Baldrige Criteria ask about your workforce and how it represents the diversity of your hiring and customer communities. The Criteria ask how your organizational culture benefits from the diversity of your workforce. Of course, we define diversity more broadly than the content of this blog post. We include race, religion, color, gender, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, age and generational differences, education, geographic origin, and skill characteristics, as well as differences in ideas, thinking, academic disciplines, and perspectives. However, this blog post is equally valid for considering and benefitting from any of those diverse characteristics of people.

I don't think I have ever seen a Baldrige application in which diversity of the management team was given as one of the organization's strategic advantages. Can your organization claim this strategic advantage? Would you benefit if you could? Would you be able to better serve your current and potential customers?

P.S. For anyone who is curious, after my previous blog post, my wife and I did return to the vehicle emissions testing facility this past Saturday. Of course, we did check the web site first to make sure it was not a service reduction day. We were in and out in less than ten minutes and both cars passed.

Quality on Campus

Posted by Jeff Lucas



The American Society for Quality has a new publication devoted to identifying best practices and improving quality in higher education, unambiguously named Quality Approaches in Higher Education.  The publication will serve as a peer-reviewed source for an ongoing discussion of issues related to applying the tools of quality, continuous improvement and Baldrige in higher education settings. 

The current issue, Vol. 1 No. 2, includes an editorial on STEM Education by current ASQ Education Division Chair, Cindy Veenstra, along with articles on Integrating Writing into Freshman Engineering, Monitoring Student Attrition, Transforming Teaching Evaluations, and Metrics for Assessing Engineering Instruction.

Increasing interest in the Baldrige approach in the higher education sector has been an extremely tough nut to crack.  There are of course some notable exceptions such as the work of the Accreditation Council for Business Schools & Programs that I wrote about here and the highly regarded Excellence in Higher Education model that integrates Baldrige Criteria requirements with the standards of the regional accrediting bodies. However, achieving wide ranging impact has been slower than desired in comparison to other sectors, such as health care, which has seen wide-scale adoption of Baldrige. 

So we welcome this new addition to the conversation and encourage you to both check out the current content and contribute your own.  Author guidelines and the call for manuscripts for future issues can be found in the publication.  Additional information about Baldrige in education as well as testimonials may be found here.

And by all means, if you have the silver bullet that will get Baldrige onto our nation's college campuses, please share it now.

Alliance to Develop Baldrige-Based Assessment for State and Local Programs

Posted by Bob Fangmeyer

We are pleased to announce that the Alliance for Performance Excellence has been awarded a contract to develop and implement a Baldrige-based assessment for state and local award programs.

Programs will be invited to participate in the evaluation process, which will allow for four levels of assessment ranging from submitting an Organizational Profile and key results to writing a full 50-page application. Programs that apply will receive a small monetary award as well as additional funds to help address one or more opportunities for improvement identified through the evaluation.

For more information, please contact me at robert.fangmeyer@nist.gov or 301-975-4781.

The Mudgeon Reappears

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

Okay, I have spent several weeks being a cheerleader, so now I have to display my other side. My state has a biennial vehicle emissions testing requirement, which I wholeheartedly support as a citizen committed to a cleaner environment. In our state this testing is conducted at state-owned testing facilities. We have two cars that require inspection at the same time. The hours that our testing facilities are open are clearly printed on the inspection notice. With our current notice there also was bold print across the listing of inspection stations and addresses that the station closest to us had been permanently closed.

 So, this past Saturday morning my wife and I headed out to the next closest station, about 30 minutes from our home. As we approached the station there appeared to be an unusually long line of cars not only inside the station, but out into the street and around the corner. State inspection stations have multiple lanes where you line up inside the station, so I had never witnessed this kind of line before. For the next ten minutes we inched our way forward, until we arrived at the closed gate for the inspection facility. The line was from cars turning around in tight quarters at the entrance gate (inside the facility entrance ramp).

We drove back home, two cars, one-half hour each. I looked on the vehicle emissions testing website and found that state budget reductions have resulted in "service reduction days and some Saturday closures." The first instance of this (at least in 2010) was January 2nd. Do you think between then and now, a notice of closures could have been added to the inspection mailing? Do you think they calculated how much exhaust is being added to the environment by the many drivers who travel to their inspection station on a service reduction day, not knowing it is a service reduction day? Do you think they care? Do you think I was frustrated (polite word)?

Do you think they could benefit from the Baldrige Criteria? How do you think they would answer questions like: "What are your key means of customer support, including your key communication mechanisms? How do you build and manage relationships with customers to meet their requirements and exceed their expectations?"

Are there any organizations you would like to ask these questions? As always, thanks for reading and responding!

Baldrige Is Alive and Well in Latin America

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

This past week I had the pleasure of attending the Peruvian Quality Award ceremony, the Latin American Quality Week meeting and a meeting of the Latin American Quality Awards network all in Lima, Peru. It was a busy few days. (I also had the opportunity to take a day to visit Machu Picchu; it truly defies description.) Perhaps of greatest interest to Blogrige readers was the meeting with the Latin American Quality Award leaders, attended by representatives of nine countries and the Ibero-American quality foundation. Many of these programs use the Baldrige Criteria directly; some use them as a research base and modify them for their own needs. I always learn the most from questions people ask and the dialog that follows.

Our discussion was wide-ranging from performance results of Baldrige Award recipients to upcoming Baldrige Criteria changes. But the focus of our discussions was on strategic considerations and challenges, which are the same in Latin America as they are in the U.S. Achieving customer engagement and how social media will become a larger part of customer engagement were of great interest, but no one was ready to predict the future state at this time. We talked about challenges CEOs face today and about the challenges of strategy execution and agility in a tough global economy. All organizations are struggling with increasing complexity and a need for simplicity so that some level of agility is possible. 

I was also curious to learn more about the Peruvian economy, which has displayed strong growth (about 7%/year), despite the current global economy. Furthermore, in its just released report, the IMF World Economic Outlook predicts the Peruvian economy will expand 8.3% this year. This is coupled with very moderate inflation and declining unemployment. The report states that "impressive improvements in macroeconomic policy frameworks over the past two decades, combined with accommodative policies, easy external financing conditions, and strong commodity prices, are driving a robust recovery in the LA-4" (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru). If hotel and restaurant occupancy are any indicators of consumer confidence, it also appeared to be strong.

So, what does this all mean for us. It means that all countries are becoming very competitive in our global economy. Our definition of performance excellence, as embodied by the most current version of the Criteria for Peformance Excellence  still are viewed as an "international standard." It means that the Criteria are one dimension of setting a level playing field in a global economy. It also means that U.S. organizations should be paying attention to the contents of the Criteria, because we know our competitors are paying attention.

What do you think?

 

The Name Game

Posted by Zara Brunner

We are pleased to announce that the Baldrige National Quality Program officially has a new name: the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program.  We are thrilled to announce our "new name for a new era" and ask you to help us celebrate it. 

There is a bit of background as to why the name has changed and for that I refer you to Dr. Harry Hertz's lastest column in the Insights on the Road to Performance Excellence. 

My colleague has been mentioning that song (The Name Game) since we announced our new name and I can't get it out of my head.  So I'm sharing it with you too.  Feel free to think of how to play the name game with it...Baldrige, Baldrige, bo-Baldrige...