BLOGRIGE

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!

Could the MBA Become an MPE?

Posted by Zara Brunner

What if a Master of Performance Excellence (MPE) Degree Program existed?  Would you enroll?  And what could you learn from it?

Confident that they have identified an idea whose time has come, Loyola University New Orleans College of Business will offer a MPE Degree Program with the Fall 2012 semester.  The MPE brochure identifies the focus as equipping students in the "systems-centered design and management of high performance organizations."  The MPE program promises more than a remodeled MBA.

There is nothing "old school" about this innovative degree program.  The MPE student doesn't apply individually, but in partnership with his/her employer--referred to as the Sponsoring Organization (S0).  The SO commits to support their student(s), typically junior-level executives identified for career advancement, in becoming positive change agents within the organization.  The MPE program, designed to allow the student to apply acquired competencies to the workplace in real time, delivers products of value for the SO.  To ensure success, the SO's CEO and senior leadership agree to support the student by naming a "strategic team" that meets on a regular basis to provide input to the MPE student and address any barriers the student may face in completing an organizational performance assessment, analysis, and project-related change efforts.  The SO assigns a senior executive to help break down those barriers so that the organizational improvement project can provide a positive return on investment to the SO.  The SO is expected to further support the student by assigning a certain percentage of the MPE student's work time to class study, project completion, and preparation. 

The SO covers the cost of the MPE program because the return on investment directly benefits the SO's operations and results and encourages the employee's long-term engagement with the organization.

The MPE curriculum is based on the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence and focuses on:

• visionary leadership
• customer-driven excellence
• organizational and personal learning
• valuing workforce members and partners
• agility
• focus on the future
• managing for innovation
• management by fact
• social responsibility
• focus on results and creating value
• systems perspective

Most of you likely recognize these as the Baldrige Core Values-- the key to any organization wanting to achieve excellence. MPE coursework includes: leadership dynamics; management, complexity, and systems science; strategic management, performance improvement, and risk management; marketing and customer relationship management; human capital; enterprise management; evidence-based management; leading change; advanced management science methods; and improvement plan development and implementation. 

I checked in with the visionary behind this new program to learn more about what Loyola expects to accomplish with the new MPE.  Ron Schulingkamp is the Senior Strategic Consultant of DM Petroleum Operations Company (Managing and Operating Contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy Strategic Petroleum Reserve).  Ron led and continues to lead the company's improvement efforts.  Ron's effort led to DM receiving the Baldrige Award in 2005 and the Robert W. Campbell International Award for Environment Safety and Health in 2006.  He leads an alumni group of Baldrige Award Recipients who encourages adoption of the Baldrige Criteria within organizations and champions evidence-based practices in performance improvement in the journey to excellence. 

Q: So Ron, tell us a little bit about what motivated you to start the program, benefits to participants, and some of your visions and goals for it?

A: Continuous improvement is my passion, much like everyone reading this.  As children, we learned that we could not have everything we wanted and in basic economics, we learned we live in a world of scarce resources.  In the U.S., we must become more efficient and effective in everything we do--especially our strategy and execution.  Large or small, companies must be better and the leadership smarter than the competition to maintain the U.S. standard of living for future generations.  My goal is simple: drastically improve the performance of organizations throughout the U.S. to ensure the future is better not worse.  Achieving this goal is an incredible challenge.  Education is key to achieving it, but the leadership of U.S. educational institutions have to learn and improve--especially business schools.

Q: Why a new program like the MPE?

A: Simply put, we need a new "mental model" for the future.  The MPE is an important start.  We live in a world of complexity, but we approach problems with the simple cause and effect concepts we learned as young adults in undergraduate school.  Our decisions over time have stressed global systems that we have taken for granted which now have created monumental challenges for humanity.  The thinking that led to today's challenges cannot solve today's challenges or improve tomorrow. 

The MPE is designed to teach executives how to see, think, and understand complexity and interrelationships.  Generally, MBA programs teach within the context of silos and linear cause and effect relationships.  This is how traditional businesses, institutions of higher learning included, function.  This type of silo linear thinking yields typical problems, such as sub-optimization, that we see time and time again. 

Systems thinking is central to the MPE curriculum.  The Baldrige Criteria are incorporated in the MPE as a model for understanding complex systems, their related processes, and organizational relationships.  There is an intense focus on developing leadership's ability to understand systems, variation, knowledge of theories that help predict outcomes, and the student's analytical capabilities to ultimately improve.  The goal is to make organizational decisions based n the systematic analysis of current processes, gaps in performance, and identified opportunities for improvement. 

So let me wrap this all up by asking: do you know of any other novel concepts or curricula?  Please share them with our readers. 

The Verdict Is In -- Baldrige Is About Revenue and Jobs -- Part 2

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon

While I believed the data were impressive in my first Blogrige post on this topic, a number of you asked me to prove it. So we have been looking for comparative data. While we were not able to find data for revenue and sites, all the talk is about jobs these days. And for jobs we were able to find data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and Bureau of Labor Statistics. We were able to look at the same periods of time as we had for each of our winners and look at the jobs data for service industries, manufacturing, and small business, as appropriate to match each two-time winner of the Baldrige Award. To refresh memories, the data for two-time Baldrige winners: median growth in number of sites was 67%, median growth in revenue was 93%, and median growth in jobs was 63%.

And the comparative average growth in jobs for the matched industries and time periods was 3.2%.

Some additional data about the 83 Baldrige applicants in 2010. They represented  277,700 jobs, 1,500 work locations, over $38.5 billion in revenues/budgets, and more than 80 million customers served.

Thanks for asking for additional data!

Baldrige 20/20: A New Book for Senior Leaders

Posted by Christine Schaefer

"Without a crystal ball, how can you make sound decisions now that will steer your organization toward success on the road ahead?"

That's the question at the start of Baldrige 20/20: An Executive's Guide to the Criteria for Performance Excellence.

As some of you have read--via the flyers we've begun distributing at conferences or online communications such as our Update newsletter and Harry Hertz's Insights column--the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program has been working on an executive's guide to the Criteria. Now back from press and also available as a PDF on our Web site, the book is for senior leaders of U.S. organizations across the business, education, health care, and nonprofit sectors. The presentation of data and stories shows why and how any organization can benefit from using the Criteria for Performance Excellence. The 116-page book not only introduces the Criteria for Performance Excellence to top leaders who have not used the Baldrige management framework and self-assessment tool before but also presents a sampling of role-model organizations' results, stories, and tips on the journey to performance excellence.

Here are two key endorsements of the book:

The data and stories in this timely book make a convincing case that use of the Baldrige Criteria can help organizations assess and improve their performance, becoming more sophisticated about how to align all of their processes to achieve desired results.

--Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; Chair and Director, Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative

Baldrige 20/20: An Executive's Guide to the Criteria for Performance Excellence provides today's executives with practical examples and keen insights on how organizations can stay focused and excel.

--Greg Page, Chairman and CEO, Cargill, Inc.

So what's the answer to the question at the start of this blog (which comes from the book's introduction)? Use of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, of course! If you are an executive of one of the 86 U.S. organizations that have received the Baldrige Award to date, or if you lead one of the thousands of other organizations that have adopted the Baldrige framework for performance excellence, you already knew that.

Either way, order a copy of Baldrige 20/20 for yourself or a senior leader you know by calling the American Society for Quality (ASQ) at 1-800-248-1946 and asking for item number T1537.



 

A Passing Fad—Not!

Posted by Pamela Wong

You’ve probably heard someone somewhere describe Baldrige as a “flavor of the month.” Our award winners, however, quickly dispel that judgment.

Take, for example, the University of Wisconsin–Stout, which in 2001 became the first university to receive the Baldrige Award. Since 2001, here are some examples of the university’s achievements:  

·         It’s enrollment grew from about 8,000 students to a record 9,339 in 2010.

·         Despite our nation’s economic woes, 98 percent of its first-year graduates report that they are employed this year.

·         Through its two-year-old Discovery Center, UW-Stout collaborates with businesses, industries, and communities in dealing with their challenges. Discovery Center clients report increased sales, cost savings, investments, and jobs.

 

UW–Stout remains a strong supporter of the Baldrige Program and the Criteria for Performance Excellence. At the 23^rd Quest for Excellence last April, their representatives presented a session on the use of social media in higher education. Social media is part of the 2011–2012 Criteria (item 3.1) as an important method for listening to customers.

 

Far from being a passing fad, maintaining its “quest for excellence” is a theme at Stout. The university’s provost, Dr. Julie Furst-Bowe, is traveling three times this year through the Fulbright Specialists Program to the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy in Baku, Azerbaijan.

 

“This project will help the academy build and develop its internal quality assurance processes,” Furst-Bowe said. “I will assist the faculty and administrators in developing policies and procedures and work with them to create new academic programs to meet the needs of a growing student population.”

 

Furst-Bowe will be speaking on September 27 at the Baldrige Regional Conference in Birmingham, AL. Join us and hear more of UW–Stout’s story!