And a Great Group of Fellows They Are

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

The first year of the Baldrige Executive Fellows program is now history. The first cohort of Fellows graduated at the Baldrige regional conference in Kansas City, MO on September 13, 2011. The class consisted of a dozen senior executives from organizations across America with a predominance coming from the manufacturing sector, including Dow Chemical, Sara Lee, and USG, and service giants like AARP and UPS. To round out the group there were a few from health care, large and small, one from higher education, and a small business CEO.

As part of the experience, each Fellow had to conduct a capstone project of strategic significance to their organization. The Fellows gave their final report outs at the Kansas City session. The projects and accomplishments were a "WOW." Projects dealt with market segmentation and expansion, employee engagement, and new product introduction to name a few.

I want to comment on some of the common elements I saw in their projects. These elements represent true Baldrige learnings and for many of the Fellows can be attributed to their exposure to Baldrige Award winners and their senior executives. What did these Fellows learn and do? They:

• leveraged organizational core competencies
• built on strategic advantages to address strategic challenges
• made strategic use of the voice of the customer
• segmented data and used the analysis
• focused on appropriate metrics - selection, use, alignment
• saw that communication can always be improved
• observed organizations with a systems perspective and brought it to bear on their projects

It was an outstanding year for the Fellows and for those of us who had the opportunity to work with them. If you are or know an executive who could benefit from this experience, we are now accepting applications for our next cohort group. More on that in a future blog post!