Dear Blogrige readers: We wish everyone a wonderful holiday season and will return with a new Blogrige posting on January 7, 2014.  If you have not done so already, please view our holiday card. Best wishes, The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program

Posted by Christine Schaefer We could all learn a lot from Dr. John Timmerman, senior strategist of customer experience and innovation at Gallup. In his former work as corporate vice president of quality and operations at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Timmerman helped build ground-breaking practices that strengthened the customer focus of the luxury-brand service organization, which earned two Baldrige Awards in the 1990s. Dr. John Timmerman In a recent article in Gallup Business Journal, Timmerman points out that innovation, rather than merely incremental improvement, is a necessity for organizations facing rapid change in their strategic situations today. In a subsequent interview for this blog, Timmerman first distinguished "little i innovation" (of processes and products) from "big I innovation" (of the organization’s business model). "Business-model innovation leverages the entire workforce, with everyone in the organization having a role in innovating and moving the organization forward," he pointed out. "For that kind of innovation, Baldrige [the Criteria for Performance Excellence] provides the best-known framework to help an organization." Following are more excerpts from the interview. How do you see the role of the Baldrige framework (the Criteria for Performance Excellence) in supporting innovation? To transform an organizational structure there are two different ways of thinking that are interrelated. We can get everyone to be involved in innovating in all of their areas as an ongoing part of their role and responsibility. We can also innovate the business model. And then those two things can also be part of one and the same—in other words, if you’re incorporating innovation as part of your cultural fabric, you can do that while you’re using business-model innovation at the very highest level. If a senior leadership group wants to innovate their business model, Baldrige offers an already well-defined framework. [Baldrige] Award recipients provide the best practices for an organization to consider because they are already vetted through the Baldrige examination process. In the Gallup Business Journal interview, you make the case that quality is still relevant, stating, "I believe you can have quality—zero defects—without innovation, but you can’t have innovation without quality processes, the systematic and repeatable methods to foster speed and agility." How might you recommend making the case to business executives to invest in resources related to improving quality and achieving excellence?    When people see the term quality, they think of controlling defects and risk mitigation. That’s one side of the definition, having a repeatable process to identify and eliminate defects like Six Sigma. But quality is also about having repeatable processes to foster transformation, innovation, and rapid improvement cycles in an organization. And I think it’s a problem that executives sometimes don’t see the other half of the coin or definition. So when the term quality comes up, I think they default to defect mitigation, which is a repeatable process, but not the repeatable processes in fostering performance excellence and improvement. When I look back at Ritz-Carlton, I see that one of the biggest benefits of going on a [Baldrige] journey is that we identified the gaps through the performance excellence framework and then we went out and studied other organizations and saw what their best practices were, which fed our improvement strategies, not just to close the gaps but to become much more competitive. I don’t see as many organizations doing that kind of structured benchmarking today as I have in the past. I think they’re trying to glean stuff as everything in the world is moving so fast. So they bring somebody in, a thought leader that already knows the answer, or get it through some knowledge resource. And that’s good, but it may not give you the deeper insights you need. It’s one thing to read the Toyota production process; it’s something very different to go to Toyota and see how it’s applied, because then you get the cultural context. And what the Baldrige process allows you to receive when you listen to the [award] recipients is the cultural context, so that you know how to fit in the best practice within the organization. The brilliance of Baldrige is that it puts organizations on a stage where they share not just best practices but also the organizational profile, the cultural context of how practices fit in—not just the good idea but how the good idea fits in within the organization. As a Gallup scientist, I believe that you need to guard against committing an FAE (fundamental attribution error) in trying to apply a good tool to the wrong context. I encourage organizations to complete the Baldrige profile assessment because it gives them the context to assess the appropriateness of best practices for their business model. At the Baldrige Program’s annual Quest for Excellence® conference years ago, you shared leading customer-focused practices at the Ritz-Carlton at the time. Tell us about the evolution in the concept of customer focus during your career. Personalization has always been out there, but The Ritz-Carlton was one of the first companies to build a platform to do it across multiple sites. The Ritz-Carlton approach was to first create a customer-centric culture, training employees to study what customers are using to understand their preferences. Second, we wanted to be able to delight customers by surprising them versus being merely being preference order-takers. Each facility has a guest relations manager that provides leadership and training to engage employees in identifying, collecting, and delivering guest preferences. What are some new developments in the area of customer focus (category 3 in the Baldrige Criteria) by high-performing organizations today? The good news is that we’re continuing to make improvements in big data and analytics. That gives us what I call these mega constructs of customer profiles, or psychographics. So I can tell you what all the Chinese 19-year-old males want when they come into a restaurant or when they go buy a car, because I’ve got all this data pulled together from disparate sources. The problem with that though is that it’s a construct so it’s kind of like in The Matrix. And when you really want to dial into customer personalization, you’ll start to see the cat walk by you two to three times like in The Matrix movie; the construct doesn’t always work [at the individual customer level]. The good thing that’s happening is that we’re starting to get a better big-data analytic understanding of what customers want by cohort, by geography, by buying patterns, and so forth. But that has to be balanced with an understanding of what customers want at an individual level. So the companies that are going to be really successful in the future will understand leading trends, those constructs, but they’re still going to be able to leverage big data—that is, leverage global information resources, R=G—and design it to [the level of] n=1. Baldrige provides the holistic framework to assess all the dimensions of an organization required for driving excellence.

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey In the current health care environment, change is a given. Ensuring that change is accepted, managed, beneficial, planned for, and cost-effective is the hard part. "The Future’s So Bright, We Have to Wear Shades" was the theme of Premier’s last values conference. I recently had the privilege of a virtual conversation with Jan Englert, RN, principal quality and safety, at Premier Healthcare Alliance, a 2006 Baldrige Award recipient, about the need for effective change in the health care industry. In fact, Premier’s own vision is to lead the transformation of health care to be truly high quality and cost effective through the collaborative power of its alliance. Such transformation by definition means change. Englert, who is speaking at the 26th Annual Quest for Excellence® conference on how organizations manage change, will focus her presentation on different ways of thinking about change through the book Switch and will hand out innovative tools on how to "grow your people." Attendees to the session will learn how change and innovation have become an expectation in their industries (particularly in light of value-based purchasing and reform) and how to turn that change into results that prove that different processes make a measurable difference. I asked her for three tips to effect change: Shrink the change! Build on your "bright spots" (people, processes). Understand that information is not necessarily the key to change. The key is not only to inform but to demonstrate the change and ensure understanding through accountability checks. "I can hand you a brochure, a PowerPoint presentation, and a document about how to do the breast stroke, but if I push you in the pool, will you necessarily know what to do from those tools?" asks Englert. "Think about that. . . . Isn’t this what we do? Have a webinar and then everyone swims? Not realistic, is it?" Englert says that innovation is needed to really sustain the change that leads to performance excellence. "It goes back to the old adage: if you want to achieve different results, you have to do things a different way. Without change, innovation, we become stale and outdated. Thinking of new ways to conduct value-added processes is key to growth in ANY organization," she says. To learn more, attend Premier Healthcare Alliance’s special presentation, "Change and Innovation at Premier: How to Steer the Elephant," at 8:45 am on Tuesday at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon Last week the quadrennial U.S. National Climate Assessment was issued. Although the report is 840 pages long, the conclusion is clear. It is stated in the very first sentence: "Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present." Although covered in the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence as part of societal responsibilities, we have struggled with the more comprehensive inclusion of climate change and environmental sustainability. This past weekend, I read an HBR blog by Andrew Winston that made a very compelling case to me for including more about climate change in the 2015-2016 revisions to the Baldrige Criteria. While some businesses have a greater opportunity to contribute to eliminating the sources of climate change, Winston points out that no organization is immune to its impacts. Winston’s comments caused me to think more about the universal impacts of climate change. The argument in my mind goes something like this: We can all expect to experience the impacts of climate change. This is true of all types and sizes of businesses, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, health care providers, and even families. How do we deal with increasingly severe storms, massive snows, flooding, power outages? These events potentially affect supply chains for businesses, whether we manufacture or provide services. Extreme weather events can affect our ability to work, productivity of our organizations, our ability to move around, and even our home energy and food supply chains. These events increase the need for aid from social services and government agencies. And all of this is independent of whether one is a major consumer of energy, producer of goods and its side products, in the middle of a supply chain, or just a household consumer of goods and services. For all of us it is about managing risk, making choices, building acceptable redundancies and alternatives into our management systems, while not building over-capacity and wasteful systems. It is about trade-offs and sustainability, from an environmental, business, societal, and even personal/family perspective. It is about support for our communities and their citizens. From a Baldrige Criteria perspective, it can impact strategic decisions and operations management. It is about workforce capabilities and capacity and worker protection. It is about financial sustainability of the organization and societal responsibility. Can we ignore this perspective in revising the Baldrige Criteria? I think not. Let me know your opinion!  

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon "It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system." This quote is not taken from the words of a modern-day CEO,  although he or she might have said it, but from Niccolò Machiavelli in the 1500′s.  Combine this statement with the words of John Kotter, well-known for his eight-step process for change management, and you begin to understand the tremendous challenges of change management, ensuring implementation success, and sustaining the changes made. Kotter said, "The rate of change is not going to slow down any time soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more." Given the accelerating rate of change and the need for organizations to sustain changes implemented, one area of study and focus for revisions in the 2015-2016 Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence is the tactical aspects of change management and change sustainability. Transformational change disrupts the status quo in an organization, forcing people out of their comfort zones, and may cause a change in cultural norms for the organization. Reactions to organizational change have been likened to a body’s immune response…resist and act to return to the prior "healthy" state. Even when initial change is successful, without constant vigilance and monitoring organizations tend to revert to old, comfortable states. An article in the November/December 2013 issue of Contingencies magazine cites Center for Creative Leadership data that 66 to 75 percent of all change initiatives fall short of their objectives. A 2013 survey by Booz & Company indicated that 65% of respondents had change fatigue (workers are asked to implement too many changes at once) and that only about half felt their organization had the capabilities to deliver change. Given these challenges, here are the process steps I have synthesized for maximizing the likelihood of successful long-term change: Management commitment Set a clear vision Prioritize change initiatives Mobilize the change management team (senior leaders, managers, and key workforce participants) Communicate, communicate, communicate Modify organizational structures and operating modes to accomplish the change Design for and enable short-term wins Establish ongoing metrics that document change process success and impacts of the change Align workforce development efforts with the new operating mode Undo old operating systems and institutionalize new systems Reward new behaviors Communicate, communicate, communicate Change from a vending machine is expected and satisfying. Organizational change is challenging and generally disruptive. It requires dedication and commitment. With that dedication and commitment, both satisfaction and success can be yours!

Posted by Christine Schaefer On August 1, the South African company Business Assessment Services (BAS)—acting on behalf of the new South African Excellence Foundation (SAEF)—publicly launched the latest South African Excellence Model (SAEMXIII™). The nonprofit SAEF will use the model as a basis for business assessment and development services for organizations in South Africa. The Baldrige Program has long participated in a global excellence council, and the Baldrige Award and Criteria for Performance Excellence have long been emulated in countries around the world. So it is not surprising that BAS CEO Ed van den Heever gives partial credit to both the Baldrige Program and the Fundação Nacional da Qualidade (FNQ) of Brazil for inspiring the new SAEM. I recently asked van den Heever—developer of the SAEMXIII and co-author of the previous SAEM1997 standards model—to share more information about the history of organizational excellence initiatives in his country. Following are his responses. Tell us about your background and experience with the Baldrige Award and national program? I have great admiration for the leader role of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) program. I also have fond memories of (retired Baldrige program director) Dr. Harry Hertz—a great man! My support for MBNQA goes back to the mid-1990s when I attended a Baldrige examiner course in South Africa conducted by Dr. Richard Chua of Juran Institute Incorporated (JII). Ed van den Heever A year earlier, the Council for Scientific Industrial Research (CSIR) of South Africa had opted to go the Baldrige Award route. I had the great fortune, coming from the private sector, to join as an executive facilitator of CSIR Total Quality Management for four years. That role included exposing the CSIR Management Team to Baldrige examiner training. After 1995 examiner training in South Africa was presented by Dr. Chua of JII, I conducted the remainder of the Baldrige examiner sessions in 1996 and 1997. As lead examiner, I facilitated Baldrige Award-based assessments in 10 CSIR business units at the same time and publishing the consolidated findings. In 1996, the CSIR and the South Africa Quality Institute (SAQI) agreed to launch a South African Criteria model (SAEM1997) and a foundation. I was appointed as the inaugural CEO of the former South African Excellence Foundation, which was formally launched in August 1997 as a not-for-profit company with ten sponsors. How is the SAEMXIII model similar to the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence? Besides the SAEM1997, the Baldrige Criteria revisions of 2006, 2008, and 2010 had a direct impact on the road ahead [toward the SAEMXIII]. However, involvement with BHPBilliton in Australia in 2008 and exposure to the FNQ Model in 2013 greatly impacted the final outcome. Among similarities, the SAEMXIII has merged the SAEM1997 Results Criteria (7-11) into a single criterion 7 (similar to the Baldrige Criteria and FNQ model). Also, similar to the Baldrige Criteria process evaluation factors of ADLI (Approach, Deployment, Learning, Integration), SAEMXIII uses PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) elements for scoring of processes. And similar to the Baldrige Criteria results evaluation factors of LeTCI (Levels, Trends, Comparisons, and Integration), SAEMXIII uses RTCK (Results/Targets/Comparative/Key performance indicator match) elements for scoring of results. The Baldrige Criteria largely dictated the selection and qualification of Criteria guidelines, key characteristics, and Criteria description. Globally the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program led the way in this area. How have the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence and the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) helped inspire the development or updates to the SAEM? For the SAEM1997 (11 Criteria model), the EFQM (1997), consisting of nine Criteria, formed the basic framework. The EFQM Model had gaps that needed focus for application in a developing country such as South Africa. Revisions included adding Baldrige Criteria-based categories on customer focus and supplier focus. The SAEM1997 was adapted for application in large (Level 1), medium (Level 2), and small (Level 3) companies or organizations. Organizations could opt for Level 1, Level 2, or Level 3, using 100 percent, 50 percent, or 25 percent of the Criteria content, respectively. The related South African Excellence Foundation (SAEF) Awards process was accordingly structured. A classic case is that Mercedes-Benz SA opted to start at Level 3, then moved to Level 2 (in-house only) in final preparation for their Level 1 Application—culminating in winning the 2000 SAEF Award. A downfall of SAEM1997 is that it was never updated! Although the model was classic by U.S. and European standards, South African companies could not reach the expected heights at the time. Unfortunately, the original SAEF last issued awards in 2002 and was liquidated by creditors in 2004. Tell us about the BAS’s services and the kinds of organizations benefitting from those offerings in your country today? With a specialty in operational excellence, BAS offers an SAEMXIII-based toolkit and guides that were developed to facilitate the Management System of Operational Excellence (MSOE), which is concordant with ISO 9004:2010. The materials offered include training materials and case studies on governance excellence and operational excellence, as well as framework, criteria, and assessment guidelines. The toolkit fits the private sector (large/medium/small businesses) and the public sector (national/provincial/local government). Other offerings include cost of quality training, training based on the MSOE Toolkit, and SAEMXII Assessor Training. Users include the Eastern Cape Provincial Government (nine departments), the Department of Transport (Eastern Cape Government, winner of the 2009 Public Sector Innovation Award), SA Revenue Services (call centers), Tsebo Cleaning Services (South Africa) Ltd., Arwyp Private Hospital Ltd., and Border Cricket (South Africa) East London. What’s next for excellence in South Africa? This year we will finalize the launch of the SAEMXIII. In 2014 we also plan to find a not-for-profit company to house the intellectual property. And we plan to facilitate funding for SAEF outside governmental control (similar to the Baldrige Foundation) and promote the new SAEF on November 13, 2014, World Quality Day. We also plan to rejoin the Global Excellence Model Council. In 2015, we plan to relaunch the South African Excellence Awards!

Dr. Joseph Juran receives a certificate of appreciation for his Baldrige support from U.S. Secretary of Commerce Robert A. Mosbacher. Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Prior to the passage of the 1987 congressional act that created the Baldrige Award, "father of quality" Dr. Joseph Juran testified in front of Congress: [The United States'] loss of quality leadership has already cost us millions of jobs and tens of billions of dollars in trade balances. To get out of this crisis, we must create our own quality revolution. It would be useful to our economy to establish a prize which would earn national recognition as evidence of high attainment in quality. By the mid-1990s, the U.S. economy did boom. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate averaged just 5.7 percent. In addition, the stock market returned 18 percent a year for the decade, and the federal government ran some surpluses. The World Bank reported that there were four straight years of GDP growth above 4 percent, which hadn’t happened since the 1960s. I’m no economist, so I am certainly not prepared to argue what happened in the 1990s, good or bad (e.g., CNN Money notes the "multi-billion-dollar accounting improprieties" of the decade), to bring about such a boom, but thinking about Juran’s notion of a "quality revolution" made me think about what he would say if he was reading the news today? Dr. Juran was part of the first board that nominated Baldrige Award recipients and gave advice to the Baldrige Program; the board included quality experts, business and industry leaders, and labor and public policy experts, among them Meredith Fernstrom of American Express Company, Armand Feigenbaum of General Systems Company, Douglas Fraser of the United Auto Workers, Bradley Gale of the PIMS/Strategic Planning Institute, David Garvin of Harvard Business School, Thomas Murrin of Westinghouse, Lionel Olmer of the Department of Commerce (international trade), and Elmer Staats (the former Comptroller General of the United States) of the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Dr. Juran was a particularly vocal advocate for the Baldrige program, and this year, the institute he founded (now called Juran Global) turns 35 years old. According to its website, "Our belief is that the United States needs the Baldrige Award process and framework to help assure our country remains competitive around the globe for decades to come." So to Dr. Juran, Juran CEO Joe DeFeo, and the institute, the Baldrige Program congratulates you for 35 years!

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Here’s an interesting tidbit about the Baldrige Executive Fellows, a nationally ranked leadership development program for senior leaders, that looks at the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence through the lens of leadership. There have been several promotions of Fellows to the highest-ranked positions in their organizations after they graduated from the year-long fellowship. Certainly, not every promotion is directly attributable to participation with the Fellows, but the opportunity to be part of a discrete network of peer leaders who discuss challenges, strategies, and best practices across industries certainly couldn’t hurt. Here are some of the most recent promotions and announcements: 2010 Fellow James Metcalf was promoted from chief operating officer to chairman of the board/president/CEO of USG International in 2011. 2012 Fellow Deborah Bowen was promoted from executive vice president/COO of the American College of Healthcare Executives to president/CEO in 2013. 2012 Fellow Jo Ann Jenkins was promoted from president of the AARP Foundation to CEO in 2014. 2014 Fellow Dr. Peter Pisters was promoted from vice president, Regional Care System at MD Anderson Cancer Center to president and CEO of University Health Network in Toronto, Canada. 2014 Fellow Dr. Brett Simon recently became the director of a novel enterprise at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center—a freestanding, 23-hour, short-stay surgical hospital. 2013 Fellow Dr. Peter Pronovost recently made the list of the 50 most influential physician executives and leaders in U.S. health care in 2014. A recent ASQ Quality Progress article "Journey to Excellence" details how the Baldrige Executive Fellows use capstones as tools to drive change in their own organizations. A capstone project integrates leadership lessons learned from other senior leaders (including other Fellows and Baldrige Award-winning senior leaders) and the seven categories of the Baldrige Criteria to impact and resolve an organizational challenge. The article further details some specific capstone projects and the results achieved. Applications for the next cohort of Baldrige Executive Fellows are now being accepted. The deadline is December 15, 2014. Please see details on key dates and how to apply.

Posted by Christine Schaefer Following is another story that exemplifies how the Baldrige framework for performance excellence can help public-sector organizations better serve their communities. In particular, this is an account of how the framework has been used in the city of Los Angeles to ensure operational excellence in the delivery of government-funded career-training and other human services to local residents. I recently spoke with Manuel Chavez, an assistant general manager with the City of Los Angeles, to learn more about how he has long promoted the adoption of the Baldrige Criteria to better serve residents. As a member of the management team of the Los Angeles Housing and Community Investment Department (HCIDLA) today, Chavez oversees operations related to city housing programs. Manuel ("Manny") Chavez "The city has been dabbling in Baldrige for more than 20 years," Chavez said. His department, which was reorganized and renamed last July, is one of at least three city departments that have used the Baldrige framework over the past decade or more, according to Chavez. (Others include the Los Angeles Fire Department and the Los Angeles Convention Center.) Federal legislation—starting with the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998—has made local workforce boards throughout the United States responsible for ensuring that community-based employment and training programs "operate at a high level of quality and satisfy the expectations and needs of their customers." As the boards oversee independent organizations that use federal funding to provide career training services to local communities, the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence have been used to ensure that agencies operating local career centers meet quality standards and to promote continuous improvement in their program operations, among other aims. "The WIA legislation promoted the concept of one-stop centers for job seekers to avail themselves of services common at any site throughout the country," Chavez said. "In the City of Los Angeles and in the county, we explored use of Baldrige framework as the [WIA] legislation required use of a process to certify the level of excellence by service providers." Eventually, Chavez’s department (then the Community Development Department) refined its approach to fully adopt the Baldrige Criteria through its involvement with the California Council for Excellence—a state partner of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program that administers the California Awards for Performance Excellence (CAPE) awards. As the City of Los Angeles was subcontracting with community-based organizations to provide career-training services, Chavez said, it required all the WIA-funded contractors to apply for a CAPE award to ensure and promote operational quality. His city department also committed to apply for CAPE award. This is how "we began our journey into the performance excellence arena," said Chavez, recalling that by the mid-2000s, two operational and one administrative divisions of his department had applied for the state-level Baldrige awards. When Chavez was reassigned six years ago to the division providing human services within the city’s Community Development Department, he brought the Baldrige Criteria with him. In particular, he ensured that staff members received Baldrige Criteria training and used the framework in managing programs of the department. He recalled that the department was then "funding about 130 organizations [providing human services] at about $50,000 each, and the model was not very efficient." Under his leadership, the department in 2008 redesigned the delivery system around the WIA-based one-stop service-center model and reduced the number of human services providers to 21. As Chavez oversaw the establishment of the new service-delivery centers, called Family Source Centers, he made sure that all staff members were trained as Baldrige examiners so that they knew how to apply the Baldrige framework to ensure operational excellence. "The new model was focused on being accountable, transparent, and—most important—outcome-oriented," he said. The new contractors were also required to apply for CAPE awards, he added. By 2010, all 21 Family Source Centers had received a CAPE award, and the Community Development Department received a CAPE award in 2011. But all this did not happen without challenges, according to Chavez. "Within the department itself, we had some real obstacles, especially internal politics—not everyone was supportive of the [Baldrige improvement] journey," he said. After the Housing and Community Development Departments were realigned and renamed last year and Chavez became one of four assistant general managers, he pulled managers of the new bureau together and developed a strategic plan and scorecard. He said the Housing and Community Investment Department’s general manager is supportive of the scorecard approach to measuring performance and now "wants to take this department-wide." Among others he credits for the efforts under way, Chavez said that Grace Benedicto, acting as the performance excellence director within the Knowledge Management and Evaluation Unit of the housing department, "keeps us focused." Benedicto served as a national Baldrige examiner in 2007 and 2008. Given that the department spends federal funds, Chavez said, it contracted with California State University at Northridge to measure program success. For four years now, the university has prepared reports that, according to Chavez, show that "for the $50 million we’re spending [in federal funds], we’re getting double the return on that investment." That was not necessarily the case before the department adopted Baldrige practices. "To put it simply, folks were spending a lot of federal dollars without knowing what the return was. No one was focused on outcomes," said Chavez. "What Baldrige forced us to do was focus on outcomes. We [now] have a saying in our bureau, ‘if you can’t measure it, don’t do it.’" A key benefit of using the Baldrige Criteria, he added, is that "it has given us a private-sector approach" to work in the public sector. "It has gotten us to function as a business. Even in this area [public sector], you must operate as a business," he said. "You have a market share. You have competitors. And you must focus on customer satisfaction. If you are regularly asking your customers if they are satisfied, it changes the way the public sector works." In addition, he said, the Baldrige framework has given his organization a way to standardize services across the city. "We’re really excited that our new mayor is headed in this direction" said Chavez, suggesting that the Baldrige framework may be widely used to manage city service delivery. "We think we have a unique opportunity."

Posted by Christine Schaefer I love "ugly" holiday sweaters. Face it: many of you do, too. How else to explain the raging popularity of this wryly named commodity in recent years? As I bought one with bright colors and a fair-isle theme at my teenage daughter’s request last week, I thought about borrowing it to wear to an upcoming party of my middle-aged friends. It made me think of at least a half-dozen sweaters of my 80-year-old mother’s teaching career. She wore those brightly festooned markers of seasons for decades to amuse her grade-school students. But I decided against sharing those observations with my daughter. I didn’t want her to conclude that her new sweater could jeopardize her image in middle school hallways. Whether it is true marketing knowledge or just plain luck, somehow clothing industry experts realized a golden opportunity. Cheerfully decorated sweaters can bring back fond memories for middle-age adults and continue a tradition for younger people. And teenagers are likely to see them as expressions of nonconformity and individualism. Thus marketing "genius" has turned reinvention into innovation. I wonder how the companies that are capitalizing on this craze this season are planning for the inevitable drop in sales by an especially fickle customer group. (Trust me, the flow of barely worn cast-offs from my daughter’s closet to the family’s donation pile is proof that no retailer can bank for long on styles of the young.) See how the brand-new 2015-2016 Baldrige Excellence Framework booklet complements my (borrowed) holiday sweater? Given an uncertain market, surely any manufacturer or retailer of trendy goods could benefit from using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence to ensure that they don’t lose their shirts (or be stuck with large leftover inventories of holiday sweaters) after investing in new products in a volatile customer market. As Baldrige Award-winning businesses have demonstrated, the systems perspective and other core values of the Baldrige framework help an organization make sound strategic decisions and be agile enough to sustain strong results for the long term. Organizations operating with a Baldrige-based management system maintain an integrated focus on leadership; strategy; customers; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; the workforce; operations; and results. The assessment questions that constitute each of the Criteria’s seven categories (named in the previous sentence) reflect what we call the "leading edge of validated leadership and performance practice" since the questions are revised every two years. With this proven framework for excellence supporting their performance, organizations of any size and sector can continually improve their key processes and thus achieve beneficial results. So what do ugly holiday sweaters have to do with business excellence? A lot or a little: the answer depends on whether or not those businesses making, selling, or otherwise capitalizing on the trend are using the Baldrige framework. Those that do use it have the scaffolding to perform better year after year—even when no one is wearing ugly holiday sweaters but People Like Me.1 I will end this blog post with a sample note to prepare you to read the newly available Baldrige Excellence Framework: A Systems Approach to Improving Your Organization’s Performance, the booklet that includes the 2015-2016 Criteria for Performance Excellence. Note: Terms that appear in small caps in the Baldrige Criteria are defined in the Glossary of Key Terms in the booklet; for example: People Like Me: Those who, in the eyes of the young, have not looked stylish since we tumbled down the other side of the proverbial hill after our fortieth birthdays and started wearing comfortable shoes