Posted by Christine Schaefer How have the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence helped one of the nation’s largest and most powerful nonprofit lobbying organizations to enhance its performance? Jo Ann Jenkins, chief operating officer of AARP, Inc., and past president of the AARP Foundation, participated in the Baldrige Executive Fellows program in 2012. In the interview below, she shares key insights and results of her learning through the Fellows Program to use the Baldrige framework to boost leadership practices and her organization’s drive toward excellence. What are some of the drivers for your participation in the Baldrige Executive Fellows program? How did you learn of this program, and how do you think your participation has benefitted AARP? I have always believed that the Baldrige Executive Fellows program is an opportunity for transformational growth—from both an organizational and a personal perspective. A colleague of mine was a former Baldrige Fellow, and my boss—the CEO of AARP (A. Barry Rand)—previously led an organization (Xerox) to become a two-time winner of the Baldrige Award. After I joined the AARP Foundation as president in 2010, they both encouraged me to participate in the program—and I’m glad that I pursued the opportunity. As a Fellow, I was able to establish invaluable connections and garner insights into how other leading organizations—both private and public—are developing and implementing innovative, effective strategies in support of operational excellence and leadership development. In my current role as chief operating officer of AARP, I’ve been able to tap many of the other leaders in my cohort and draw on the diversity of perspectives and experiences they offer. Jo Ann Jenkins What are some of your key learnings about the Baldrige framework (the Criteria for Performance Excellence) and organizations that have used this framework? How did your perceptions change (if applicable) as you learned more about Baldrige as a Fellow? My experience as a Baldrige Executive Fellow exceeded my expectations of the program. It is much more than a program about organizational performance; it also delves into the discipline and leadership skills required to create and sustain a world-class organization. A significant insight that is often undervalued is that the leadership and senior management must model their organization’s mission consistently, with passion and enthusiasm. They must truly "walk the talk"—particularly during times of change. Change is more than just sending directives via e-mail and mandating that people do things differently. Effective change really does happen from the top down and swells from the ground up. Leaders must be willing to communicate and model the change in an ongoing, transparent, and consistent manner. Tell us about the latest improvement efforts at AARP; how has your organization been using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence? The Baldrige framework challenges us to think and act strategically and make an unvarnished assessment of our staff, structure, and resources to ensure that we operate from a position of strength, which allows us to achieve our mission. The Baldrige Criteria have guided how we approach our planning processes and build capacity with a focus on developing skilled practitioners. The Baldrige Criteria were instrumental in driving our organization to seek and listen to the voices of those we serve. It’s not enough to just provide programs and services to struggling seniors and older adults—we need to ensure that we are meeting the needs of our clients in ways that are appropriate and satisfying to them. With the Baldrige Criteria as our guide, we have implemented a customer feedback loop for all of our programs and for the volunteers that serve in our programs. It is providing us with actionable feedback that allows us to excel at living up to our mission. What do you see as the key challenges for large nonprofits today, and how do you think these might be overcome? Nonprofit organizations—no matter their size—are faced with delivering services in a cost-effective manner, while ensuring quality and meaningful impact. Too often, nonprofits have limited staffs or have historical approaches, which hinder innovative approaches and optimization to better meet their mission. With the ongoing changes in technology, tighter funding sources, and increased competition to reach donors, nonprofits have to be resourceful and think and act strategically. This includes tapping into new funding sources and creating new (and sometimes nontraditional) partnerships to serve clients while being accountable, transparent, efficient, and effective. I believe that the Baldrige Criteria provide a great roadmap to help generate a world-class, results-oriented organization. For any nonprofit to be successful, it must work with its leadership and its board of directors to maintain organizational integrity and consistently apply the principles to its work. What do you see as key benefits of Baldrige? The goal of any nonprofit is to create processes that allow us to spend more time on our mission and less time on administration. Applying the principles of the Baldrige Criteria can help an organization perform and become more efficient, thus engaging more donors to help achieve the organization’s mission. If you are an aspiring or current C-level executive of an organization, consider the benefits of participating in the 2014 Baldrige Executive Fellows program; the deadline for applications is December 15, 2013.  For more information on the Fellows program, see the Baldrige Web site here and/or send an e-mail to www.nist.gov/baldrige/fellows. You can also check out Blogrige interviews with two other Baldrige Executive Fellows: Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins Medicine and Seagate executive Dave Brucks.  

Posted by Christine Schaefer There is something about reaching the number "100" that seems to inspire celebrations. The news media often fetes senior citizens on their centenarian birthdays. Many organizations host 100th-anniversary events to mark their century milestones. And on a personal note, my five-year-old has lately been counting up to and down from 100 in anticipation of annual festivities for the "100th Day of School." This year, the Baldrige Program, too, has a noteworthy 100 to celebrate: more than 100 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Awards have now been earned, providing the nation with role models in every sector of the U.S. economy. Here are the three organizations that have raised the number of Baldrige Awards to more than 100: Pewaukee School District, Pewaukee, WI (education) Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano, Plano, TX (health care) Sutter Davis Hospital, Davis, CA (health care) As with winners of the previous 99 Baldrige Awards (including six that earned the distinction twice), profiles and contact information for the three 2013 Baldrige Award recipients are posted on our Web site here. Additional highlights of their achievements and journeys to excellence are often shared in blog posts here. You can also learn directly from the 2013 Baldrige Award recipients by attending their presentations—covering every category of the Criteria for Performance Excellence—at the Baldrige Program’s Quest for Excellence® conference in Baltimore next April. Please join my daughter in the countdown to that best-practice-sharing event; by the end of this month, it will be fewer than 100 days away!

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

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon Maybe it is semantics, but I think there is benefit in distinguishing among these three concepts, understanding the purpose of each of them, and the responsibilities of leadership and management for each of them. By making this differentiation, organizations have a richer set of tools for becoming better. My comments are occasioned by a recent McKinsey & Company commentary I read, entitled "Build a change platform, not a change program." In this commentary, Hamel and Zanini assert that continuous improvement requires change platforms rather than top-down, leader-managed change programs. And I agree that continuous improvement (and innovation) require leader-inspired environments or platforms that encourage intelligent risk-taking, local improvements, cross-organizational collaboration, and best practice sharing. However, in my opinion, that is different than strategic change management which is leader-driven and initiative based. Here is where the confusion enters in the McKinsey blog. They discuss social media, such as Facebook and Pinterest as examples of change that can’t and shouldn’t be managed by leadership. These are innovations, not examples of change management and the two concepts should not be equated or confused. Let me briefly explore continuous improvement, innovation, and transformational change management to provide some definition around each that might encourage the use of all three in your organization. Continuous improvement involves the ongoing improvements to processes and products that result in incremental improvements, cost savings, and productivity enhancements. Continuous improvement is part of everyone’s job in a high performing organization. Innovation involves discontinuous or breakthrough improvement of products, processes, or performance that result in new dimensions of organizational performance. Innovation can result from brainstorming, research and development, outside-the-box thinking, serendipity, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Innovation can come from anywhere in the organization, but requires a supportive environment set by senior leadership; an environment that encourages intelligent risk taking and recognizes that there will be failures in pursuing some of those risks. Change management is a leadership induced process that involves transformational organizational change that leadership controls and sustains. It requires dedication, involvement of employees at all levels, and constant communication. Transformational change is strategy-driven and stems from the top of the organization. Its origin may be from needs identified within the organization and it requires active engagement of the whole organization. All three activities should harness the minds and energy of employees. Change management is episodic and disruptive to the organization; innovation and continuous improvement should be ongoing and be constant sources of building competitive advantage. For innovation and continuous improvement, senior leaders are enablers and cheerleaders. For transformational change management, senior leaders are the chief agents. Sometimes lines among these concepts may blur, but the construct as three different concepts provides a framework for recognizing that different types of opportunities exist and all should be considered in seeking organizational performance excellence. All three concepts are embedded in the newly released 2015-2016 Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence.

Posted by Christine Schaefer About five years ago, two former leaders of Baldrige Award-winning organizations had a friendly conversation at a backyard social event. The two American executives, who had both worked with health care organizations, discussed the need for a fundamentally new way to address the nation’s problems. In particular, they considered the challenge of improving community health and education—and the economy, too. That conversation led to ambitious plans to cultivate an "archipelago" of high-performing, healthy communities in the United States. In each community, leaders of organizations from different sectors would work together to achieve and maintain excellence on  measures of health, education, and economic vitality (including employment). They would do so using a framework based on the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. The initiative is now known as Communities of Excellence 2026. The story of its conception was conveyed to me recently by Stephanie Norling, the organization’s managing director. The founders were Lowell Kruse, who had led Heartland Health (PDF profile) from 1984 until 2009 when the organization received the Baldrige Award; and Richard Norling, who served at the helm of health care alliance Premier Inc. when that organization became a Baldrige Award recipient in 2006. Kruse and Norling incorporated Communities of Excellence 2026 as a national, independent nonprofit organization in 2013. According to the organization’s foundational document, its aim is "to advance the common good by providing the roadmap for a journey to sustainable community performance excellence." Stephanie Norling pointed out that the name Communities of Excellence 2026 is based on the 250th anniversary of the United States’ founding as a nation. As the foundational document states, "Building on the foundation of democracy and liberty established by the nation’s founders, communities engaged with Communities of Excellence 2026 will have set America on course to again lead the world in health status, educational attainment, economic prosperity, and other key measures of community health and well-being." The organization envisions that participants in the initiative "will consistently be the top-performing communities in the nation and their success will meaningfully influence others across the country to strive for community performance excellence." Norling explained that the initiative will help communities work together across sectors and "support them to implement the framework, measure progress, define their practices and capabilities, and benchmark" their success. "We’d like to help communities develop collaborative practices to implement sustained community change," she said. "Communities are the level where improvements can be made most effectively," she added, invoking an observation by Don Berwick, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In Berwick’s letter of support for Communities of Excellence 2026, he writes,   My past experience as president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services convinces me that traction for real change is best achieved at the level of the community. A smaller subset of actors lacks the leverage needed to act on the system as a whole, and larger aggregates tend too often to get stuck in political complexity. To act effectively, however, communities need the guidance of a conceptual framework, and an adapted Baldrige Criteria set hold great promise as such a framework. As a former member of the Panel of Judges for the Baldrige program, I know how deep that framework is. Norling explained that her organization is planning three-year pilots in four settings: a small rural community, a rural region, a small urban area, and a large urban area. The first three pilot sites identified as ideal settings are Lake City, Iowa (a small rural community); northwest Missouri (an 18-county rural region); and Rochester, Minnesota (a small urban area). Selecting a large urban community is still in process. "The idea is that at the end of the pilot phase, we will have a fully refined and tested framework," Norling said. She stressed that the Baldrige Criteria-based framework will provide communities with a consistent approach to improving performance. The adapted framework initially focuses on health, education, and economic prosperity, but future participants in the initiative may choose to add a focus on improving performance in other sectors. How can community leaders and others learn more about the progress of this initiative? "We’re rolling out a new website and blog," said Norling. She encourages anyone interested in more information to contact her at snorling@communitiesofexcellence2026.org. Editor’s Note: Baldrige Program Director Bob Fangmeyer recently accepted an invitation to join the board of directors of Communities of Excellence 2026.

Posted by Christine Schaefer Last spring in this space we highlighted the continued progress in recent years of the Baldrige Award-winning Iredell-Statesville Schools (I-SS) of southwestern North Carolina. Among economic challenges that the 21,000-plus student district had faced over the previous five years, we noted, "Cuts in tax-based funding have amounted to millions shaved from annual education budgets. And the number of students poor enough to qualify for free and reduced-price school lunches has risen from 35 percent to just under 45 percent of the student population." Yet the district is still enhancing and maintaining improvements in wide-ranging performance areas. It does so by adhering to a systems perspective and other aspects of the Baldrige excellence framework it adopted 13 years ago. I-SS has provided inspiration and guidance to struggling school systems around the country by sharing its story and practices. Therefore, we recently asked for another update from Melanie Taylor, I-SS Deputy Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction. Taylor illuminated how public school districts can benefit from using the Baldrige framework for excellence despite the heightened poverty of U.S. schoolchildren today and other economic and social challenges: "As public schools are facing more and more challenges through increased competition and declining budgets, using the Baldrige Criteria can help districts work smarter with fewer resources," she said. Baldrige-using districts accomplish this, she explained, "by examining key processes to help determine what’s working and what needs to be improved or eliminated altogether." "As a district, we’ve been able to maintain market share and increase or maintain performance while [tax-based] resources and budgets have continued to decline," she added. "By gathering feedback even from those who choose to leave our district, we’ve been able to make improvements to the organization." According to Taylor, such feedback "has indicated a need to increase rigor and choice in the district." In response, over the last six to seven years I-SS has expanded "choice options" for students, including early college programs, career academies, dual-immersion language programs, and the International Baccalaureate program, despite declining budgets. This expansion has been possible through alignment of district resources and processes, she explained. Referring to her district’s continued use of the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence since its 2008 Baldrige Award, Taylor said, "It’s always a challenge to keep the focus. You have new staff or board members that don’t understand because they don’t have the background in continuous improvement. You continually have to on-board staff with the ‘why we do this.’" Taylor pointed out that the accountability and sharing of control that are expected in the district "make some uncomfortable." Yet on a hopeful note, she added, "Most folks get it once they’ve seen it in action and see the positive results." Among those results, I-SS has sustained dramatic improvements since 2002 on measures such as its high school graduation rate, student performance on SAT tests, state academic ranking, and percentages of highly qualified and National Board-certified teachers. I-SS also has improved its financial and budgetary results, in part by winning large grants in recent years to support student learning. For example, Taylor affirmed that I-SS is one of just seven school districts in the nation to receive a $5 million federal i3 grant, which required a $1 million private match, and that it is one of 16 districts nationwide to receive a $20 million "Race to the Top" federal grant. Taylor further noted that I-SS is the only public school district in the country to have received both of those federal grants. Taylor offered the following three tips to other school districts exploring or beginning to implement the Baldrige framework to improve systemwide performance: 1. Adopt continuous improvement at all levels of the organization: "You can gain more traction (sustainability) by implementing throughout all levels instead of just management," said Taylor. "In I-SS, we use PDSA [Plan-Do-Study-Act process improvement method] with five-year-olds." An I-SS classroom display shows an example of sharing improvements with students. Photo used with the permission of Iredell-Statesville Schools. 2. Continually focus on "why we do this" and the positive results: "Help folks understand why you’re doing what you’re doing so you gain more buy-in," stressed Taylor. 3. Engage everyone in improvement efforts: "Start by having different levels identify a problem that they think needs improving. It might not be what senior leadership would see as a problem, but if those at that level of the organization see it as a problem to address and can be a part of the solution, they’re more apt to buy in later on," Taylor noted. Taylor will be sharing best practices used in her district at the Baldrige Program’s annual Quest for Excellence® conference in April. She encourages educators and others to "come see and learn how the PDSA cycle is utilized by teachers at the classroom level to engage students, increase learning, and drive instructional improvement." To learn from this and other sessions featuring role-model Baldrige Award recipients sharing best practices, register for the Quest for Excellence, April 12-15, in Baltimore, MD.

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon Before you read further, get your tissues out. I have had many memorable moments over the years at Quest for Excellence conferences. And I have never left an annual conference without some immediate action items and feeling inspired that excellence is achievable in every type of organization. But there is one experience that has stood out over the years. Let me share the experience and then the impact it had on me. The year was 1993 and Graniterock, a 100-year old, family-owned construction materials provider in Watsonville, CA, was one of the Baldrige Award’s most recent recipients, in the small business category. It was in the session on Workforce Focus, where a concrete truck driver was the presenter for Graniterock. In those days it was an unusual choice, since the head of Human Resources was the typical presenter. The driver relayed the experience he had negotiating his annual performance agreement a year earlier. Being a small company, all employees discussed their performance plans with Bruce Woolpert, the company’s CEO. Our presenter had been avoiding Bruce because he had not had the time to draft his performance plan for the year. Growing impatient, Bruce finally said we are going to meet today, draft your plan. The driver could not draft his plan. In previous year’s his wife had helped him and he had not gotten to discussing it with her. When he arrived in Bruce’s office, with a blank plan, (Get those tissues ready!) he had to admit to never having learned to read or write. Bruce then took it upon himself to get tutoring, in an adult environment, for the driver. After assessment, it turned out he had undiagnosed dyslexia. It was now a year later at the Quest for Excellence conference with hundreds of people in the room and he was reading a speech he had written about his own journey of learning and about Granterock’s and its leadership’s commitment to employees. There was not a dry eye in the room as he received a standing ovation. By the way, he was now working on getting a private pilot’s license! One of the three basic tenets behind the Baldrige Framework is a commitment to organizational and personal learning. Why? Because we have learned from role model organizations that ongoing learning is a key to employee motivation and engagement, and they, in turn, are drivers of organizational success. While organizations still think of compensation as the primary employee motivator, we have learned the greater power of ongoing opportunities to learn and the benefits of a simple thank you from a supervisor or leader. Fair compensation is important, but the non-monetary opportunities and recognition are long-term engagement factors. I left that meeting with a renewed and strengthened commitment to my colleagues. We are together with each other for more time each day than most employees and their families. We are a family. We need to treat each other with respect and love. This memory has guided my actions for the more than 20 years. Do you want to be inspired? Do you want to hear from motivational leaders? Do you want to witness the power of an engaged workforce? Join us in April for the 27th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference; you will be better informed and glad you came!

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon Given the challenge, I can relate any three topics to each other! However, in the case of change management, social media, and CEO’s, there is a strong relationship that is reinforced by concepts in the Baldrige Excellence Framework.  Two studies  by Leslie Gaines-Roth et al. of Weber Shandwick, a leading global public relations agency, caused me to think about these linkages. First, let me briefly summarize the Weber Shandwick studies’ findings. The most recent research found that eight out of every 10 CEO’s are now engaged on-line and in the use of social media. This is more than double the percentage in 2010 (36%) when Weber Shandwick first started tracking the social media activity of CEO’s. Company websites are the primary driver of CEO social media use, with 68% of CEO’s engaging through those sites. A prior study by Weber Shandwick indicated while social media presence had once been considered risky for a CEO, it now was more important for CEO’s to use social media to transparently tell the company’s story.  According to the study, social presence shows that a leader is willing to listen, open to engaging in dialogue with stakeholders, and comfortable with change. The Baldrige criteria first included questions about use of social media in the 2013-2014 edition. We stated that one of the four purposes for using social media was to engage employees with each other and with the organization’s leaders. In the Leadership Category, the criteria ask how senior leaders communicate with the entire workforce and key customers to encourage two-way communication, including through the use of social media. In the 2015-2016 revision of the Baldrige criteria, one of the key themes for the revision is the ability to manage (implement, deploy, and sustain) significant organizational change. Organizational change management is a leadership induced process that involves transformational organizational change that leadership controls and sustains. It requires leadership dedication, involvement of employees at all levels, and constant communication. Transformational change is strategy-driven and stems from the top of the organization. With organizational rumors, hearsay, and second-hand messages traveling at the speed of electrons, and organizational change generally triggering uncertainty and anxiety, senior leaders must communicate constantly and faster than the rumor mill and reinterpreted messages to build trust and ensure accuracy and transparency of decisions, progress, and impacts. This transparency and trust builds the full organizational engagement that is necessary for transformational change to succeed. When a senior leader engages in the use of social media to transmit messages in a timely manner, this becomes an accepted and valuable way to share information and receive widespread feedback, critical to the success of change efforts. Thus CEO use of social media becomes an extremely important resource in gaining buy-in and success of organizational change initiatives. While I am not announcing any transformational change in this blog posting, I invite your feedback and support for the social media communications from the Baldrige Program!

Posted by Christine Schaefer Following is an interview with Baldrige alumnus examiner Christopher E. Laxton, executive director of AMDA-The Society for Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine (formerly the American Medical Directors Association). Laxton compares the Baldrige Excellence Framework (which includes the Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence) to two other approaches used in his sector today to improve the performance of post-acute and long-term care organizations: Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement (QAPI) and Advancing Excellence in America’s Nursing Homes Campaign (AE). Christopher Laxton, CAE Tell us about recent developments in your industry and how those impact the focus on improving the performance of care-providing organizations. I work in post-acute and long-term care. This sub-sector of the health care field has gained a great deal of visibility and importance lately as many Baby Boomers move into retirement—by some estimates (Pew, AARP) at the rate of some 10,000 a day for the next 18 years. It is not surprising, therefore, that those who work in this sector and its federal and state regulators are looking for ways to improve the performance of post-acute and long-term care (PA/LTC) provider organizations. The Baldrige Excellence Framework is a helpful guide for organizations that are pursuing performance improvement. At the same time, there are other performance-improvement approaches in use across the multiple sectors of the U.S. economy. For PA/LTC organizations, two programs that have become more prominent because of their systems approach (like that of the Baldrige framework) to performance improvement are (1) AE, which comes from the provider side of this industry; and QAPI, which comes from the main federal payer and regulatory agency: the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services (CMS). Would you please explain first how QAPI is similar to the Baldrige framework and approach? Yes. I think it is useful to look at how the QAPI and AE programs align to the Baldrige framework, both to understand their many points of connection to Baldrige Criteria categories, as well as to discern what may not be explicit in them. The CMS’s QAPI program was introduced in 2013 for nursing homes to voluntarily adopt a systems approach to improvement (http://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Provider-Enrollment-and-Certification/QAPI/nhqapi.html). The program describes QAPI as "the merger of two complementary approaches to quality management, Quality Assurance (QA) and Performance Improvement (PI). QA and PI combine to form QAPI, a comprehensive approach to ensuring high quality care." QAPI is defined as having five elements (see Figure 1): Design and Scope; Governance and Leadership; Feedback, Data Systems and Monitoring; Performance Improvement Projects; and Systematic Analysis and Systemic Action. These will be familiar to those organizations using the Baldrige approach to improve, since they align relatively well with 2015-2016 Baldrige Criteria categories: QAPI’s "Design and Scope" element relates to Baldrige Criteria category 2, "Strategy"; QAPI’s "Governance and Leadership" relates to Baldrige Criteria category 1, " Leadership"; QAPI’s "Feedback, Data Systems and Monitoring" relates to Baldrige Criteria category 4, "Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management"; and QAPI’s "Systematic Analysis and Systemic Action, and Performance Improvement Projects" relates to Baldrige Criteria category 6, "Operations." Figure 1: QAPI’s Five Elements The five QAPI elements have open, non-prescriptive definitions and guidance for applying them. This is comparable to the Baldrige framework’s approach of asking questions rather than dictating particular solutions, based on the understanding that there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution to organizational excellence. This is especially true in the PA/LTC sector, where—despite years of organizational improvement efforts and extensive regulatory oversight—there is wide variability in provider size, scope, capacity, and quality. Next, would you please tell us about the AE program and how it compares to the Baldrige framework? Of course. Advancing Excellence (AE) was founded in 2006 by a coalition of 28 organizations that included nursing home providers, quality improvement experts, and government agencies (https://www.nhqualitycampaign.org/). The Campaign now includes more than 62 percent of the nation’s nursing homes and has a local presence in every state and the District of Columbia through a network of participants called Local Area Networks for Excellence (LANEs). AE has identified nine quality goals (see Figure 2) that describe areas of key importance to good nursing home care that are often challenging for providers. Those areas are where it is likely that nursing homes will find opportunities for improvement, to use a Baldrige term. The AE goals are organized into two groups that will sound very familiar to Baldrige framework users: four organizational goals, which are process-focused; and five clinical outcome goals, which are results-focused. The nine AE goals align the Baldrige Criteria in the following ways: AE’s Consistent Assignment goal is a Baldrige Criteria category 5 ("Workforce") goal, as is AE’s Staff Stability goal. AE’s Hospitalizations goal aligns with Baldrige Criteria category 6 ("Operations"), since it principally relates to item 6.1 (on work processes). AE’s Person-Centered Care goal is clearly a Baldrige Criteria category 3 ("Customers") goal. And AE’s five Clinical Outcomes goals (Infections, Medications, Mobility, Pain, and Pressure Ulcers) are all Baldrige Criteria category 7 ("Results") goals, though they each have process elements that are relevant to Baldrige Criteria categories 4 and 6. Figure 2: Advancing Excellence’s Nine Goals The AE program also identifies a seven-step process that organizations can adopt to systematically address each goal in their organization (see Figure 3). These seven steps have some alignment with the Baldrige process-evaluation factors (approach, deployment, learning, integration [ADLI]) and, to a lesser extent, the Baldrige results evaluation factors (levels, trends, comparisons, integration [LeTCI]). Figure 3: Advancing Excellence’s Seven Steps With all these similarities, do you see these approaches as competing or complementary with each other? While the CMS QAPI program may resonate with those familiar with the Baldrige framework, I believe it would be a mistake to "choose" one over the other. One reason is that the Baldrige framework is very inclusive—accommodating all varieties of performance improvement tools, such as Plan-Do-Study-Act, Lean, Six Sigma, and so forth. Furthermore, when you line up both the QAPI and AE programs against the Baldrige Criteria (see crosswalk of 2013-2014 Baldrige Criteria to QAPI and AE), a comprehensive performance excellence framework for the PA/LTC sector is revealed. It is well aligned with the Baldrige Criteria categories, and it is specifically focused on the highly complex and challenging organizational and customer/patient/resident environment found in this sector’s care settings. These are not simply academic considerations for how quality might be improved in this important and previously neglected sector of U.S. health care. The demographic shift to an older population in this country and around the world—sometimes referred to as the "Silver Tsunami"—is producing major changes in public policy and rapid and massive shifts in market forces that will have a direct impact on the care and support available to our nation’s elders. What do you believe needs to happen in relation to the Baldrige, QAPI, and AE improvement tools to address the current and coming challenge of caring for more senior citizens? It is a basic principle of organizational excellence that systems produce exactly the results that they are designed to produce—intentional and unintentional. Having worked in the long-term care field for 30 years and having served as a Baldrige examiner for seven, I am inspired by the existence of such powerful frameworks for improvement. Now our long-term care leaders must take up these tools and apply them. Who better to do so than those who know intimately the complexity and challenges facing this sector? If they do not, others—with less commitment and connection to preserving and enhancing the health and well-being of our seniors—are sure to impose changes on us that will be neither of our design nor of our choosing.

Posted by Christine Schaefer In anticipating festivities for the birthday of the United States of America this weekend, you’re probably thinking about fireworks. But for inspiration beyond Independence Day, consider how certain organizations reflect foundational values of the nation and its drive for excellence. I’m referring to the high-performing organizations in every sector of the U.S. economy that have received (or are on a path to receive) a Baldrige Award. Consider how such organizations’ commitment to continuously raise performance levels reflects a longstanding element of the American ethos: the willingness to work hard to pursue a better life. Consider that Baldrige Award recipients must demonstrate effective and ethical leadership and governance, a well-executed strategy, well-integrated use and management of knowledge and information, innovative and efficient operations, and favorable and improving results. (As Baldrige geeks know, those relate to requirements in categories 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7, respectively, of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence.) Looking deeper, consider that the award recipients have adopted—as one of nearly a dozen core values of the Baldrige Excellence Framework—a commitment to valuing people. Consider, too, that the honored organizations have demonstrated a focus on supporting customers, community members, and employees alike (categories 3 and 5 of the Baldrige Criteria). And that their strong focus on customers, key communities, and workforce members is manifest in systematic work processes and trended results. In pursuing and proving excellence in all areas of the comprehensive Baldrige framework, the 99 recipients to date of the prestigious award honor the legacy of the nation’s founders and earliest settlers in striving to create a better country for their families and future descendants. The Baldrige Award recipients also reflect ideals of generations of immigrants since July 4, 1776, as they too have contributed their labor, ingenuity, and drive for improvement to better U.S. industries, institutions, and communities. Since the Baldrige Award is a Presidential honor, consider the following statements of the past three U.S. Presidents who have linked the achievements of Baldrige Award recipients to the nation’s drive for excellence: "The road to greatness in America has been, and always will be, traveled by those who embrace change and work hard every day to be the best; the organizations we honor today with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award exemplify that spirit," President Obama said. "This year’s recipients have shown how quality, innovation, and an unending quest for excellence help strengthen our nation and brighten the future of all Americans." (Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States) "[The Baldrige Award] is a reminder of things that must never change: the passion for excellence, the drive to innovate, the hard work that goes with any successful enterprise." (George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States) "The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which highlights customer satisfaction, workforce empowerment, and increased productivity, has come to symbolize America’s commitment to excellence." (William J. Clinton, 42nd President of the United States)

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Park Place Lexus Plano, TX In 2005, when Park Place Lexus (PPL) became the first automotive dealership to be named a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipient, it ranked among the country’s top Lexus dealers. And in the four years of applying the Baldrige Criteria, of receiving feedback reports, and leading up to the award, the company’s gross profit had increased by 51.3 percent. At its two locations in Plano and Grapevine, TX, PPL continues to sell and service new and pre-owned Lexus vehicles, as well as sell Lexus parts to the wholesale and retail markets. But the highly competitive automotive market has seen some direct market hits since 2005, so how does PPL ensure its continued performance excellence? According to Jamie Capehart, Performance Improvement Specialist at Park Place Lexus, success, in part, comes from a focus on the workforce. At both upcoming regional Baldrige conferences in Nashville, TN, and Denver, CO, Capehart will be sharing the importance of a workforce focus, especially in a competitive industry. In a virtual interview, Capehart previewed her upcoming presentation: Why has a focus on the workforce been important to your success?   Our employees (which we call "Members") are central to our success. We attribute our growth and ability to retain our Members in a highly competitive market to our hiring philosophy-putting the right people in the right jobs-and our commitment to the development of our Members. What are your top tips (e.g., three to five suggested practices) for using Baldrige to support  a workforce focus across an organization? Hire for your culture Apply a systematic, meaningful approach for onboarding and training new Members Utilize a learning management system to manage and track learning Plan for growth through a systematic succession planning process What are a few key reasons that organizations in your sector can benefit from using the Baldrige Excellence Framework? To maintain a balanced focus on all contributing success factors To remain innovative and stay ahead of the competition To ensure that you have the most skilled workforce in the industry What else might participants learn about at your conference session?  Our team structure Performance improvement methodology Member engagement methodologies Development methodologies Strategic planning process Growth since 2005 How our workforce supports innovation Join us at the 2015 Baldrige Regional Conferences to attend this session and many more from current and former Baldrige Award recipients.

By Christine Schaefer Pal’s Sudden Service received the Baldrige Award in 2001. Since then, the quick-service restaurant chain’s founder, Pal Barger, has repeatedly shared why he considers his company’s heavy investment in employee training to be cost-effective—despite high turnover in the industry. Other business leaders reportedly ask Pal, "What if you spend all this time and money training someone and then they leave?’" His response to them: "Suppose we don’t, and then they stay?" Over the past 15 years, an extraordinary commitment to customer-focused excellence and workforce development has continued to benefit Pal’s Sudden Service. The 27-restaurant chain based in Kingsport, Tennessee, has received wide attention and recognition for both its strong customer focus and uncommon practices in educating employees. A profile of the company published last November in The Washington Post described the "secret sauce" for Pal’s success: Noting that Pal’s inventory turned over 143 times a year, compared to an industry average of 27, the authors of the article attributed Pal’s high productivity to streamlined work processes designed around "laser-like intensity on one thing: the customer." In April 2014, when Inc. Magazine named Pal’s to its list of "25 Most Audacious Companies," it reported that Pal’s senior leaders and managers each spend 10 percent of their time daily training employees. David McClaskey (far left) in Pal’s BEI training room The training Pal’s Sudden Service provides its workers goes beyond standard practices to cultivate behavioral traits for them to become future leaders—in the same or other businesses. And the company offers training to leaders and employees of other organizations too: the Kingsport-based training center of Pal’s Business Excellence Institute (BEI) regularly provides classes to help organizations in its community and globally improve their performance. Pal’s BEI was created as a systematic mechanism for Pal’s Sudden Service to carry out its responsibility as a Baldrige Award-winning company to share its role-model practices with other companies of all types. "It has been supporting the Malcom Baldrige National Quality Award’s mission by systematically inspiring and enabling other organizations to learn and immediately apply simple and effective performance-excellence practices since 2000," noted David McClaskey, Pal’s co-founder (along with Thom Crosby) and president. "Since 2012, 100 percent of the organizations that have attended have applied one or more practices they learned within four weeks of taking a class," said McClaskey. For example, in August, school-nutrition employees of the Kingsport City (TN) Schools received customer-service training from Pal’s instructors at the facility. "They are now busy applying what they have learned," he added. Pal’s BEI training center Pal’s BEI is "a full-time operation providing training and consulting based on Pal’s role-model performance-excellence principles and practices," said David Jones, the institute’s vice president. "We train over 700 per year from around the world in our Kingsport training center," said Jones. "Our reach extends to thousands more [in our role] as speakers at conferences and workshop leaders. About 50 percent of our clients are restaurants; the other 50 percent are from all types and sizes of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations." David Jones (speaking from the right) in Pal’s BEI training room Training at Pal’s BEI covers principles and practices related to the Baldrige Excellence Framework, including the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. "We make it a point to teach that adopting the Baldrige Criteria as a basis for the company’s management and work systems is what took Pal’s from good to great," said Jones. He added, "Pal’s still uses the [Baldrige] Criteria to do internal assessments. So even though you haven’t heard from us on the applicant scene, we are still very much involved and generating even better results today than we did in 2001."

Posted by Dawn Marie Bailey Why didn’t Sotheby’s envision e-bay? Why didn’t IBM create the PC operating system? Why did CBS fail to see the value of CNN? Why did GM miss the minivan? Why didn’t AT&T invent AOL? And why didn’t Kodak come to market with digital photos when it had the technology? According to Robert "Rusty" Patterson, chairman and CEO of the National Council for Advanced Manufacturing (NACFAM) and an international speaker on topics such as emerging competitive concepts, the shape of industry in the future, and how to position your organization to be a next generation enterprise, many companies that were once household names have been destroyed because they didn’t have a common culture that was innovative, creative, forward thinking, and conducive to collaboration that could position them for the future. "If you want to have long-term sustainability, you’ve got to have a culture that looks to the future, envisions what it could be," said Patterson. Then "bring in outsiders, bring in other people who can help you see what that vision needs to be. Have a common culture throughout your organization so that everyone knows what their roles are, what roles they can play. This fits right in with the Baldrige Core Values and the whole [Baldrige] process. . . . You’re either going to [create this culture] calling it Baldrige, or you’re going to do it calling it something else. . . . [The Baldrige Program] has got the framework; all [organizations have] got to do . . . is use it, and it will work." The Baldrige Excellence Framework uses a "systems approach," teaching that organizations can achieve that kind of pervasive culture in part through a systems approach to managing and improving their organizations. NACFAM is a manufacturing policy think tank that focuses on policy issues related to sustainable manufacturing, workforce development, technology and innovation, and supply chain optimization. Patterson said that NACFAM’s mission is to strengthen and support  U.S. manufacturing, with value creation and job growth in the sector absolutely essential to a healthy economy. He said the biggest challenge for small and medium manufacturing enterprises today is being able to innovate quick enough. "It used to be that the drivers [for sustainability] were value delivery and reduction of variation at all costs. We had to have efficiency, productivity, process discipline. Back in the ’80s and ’90s, we got fairly good at that, but we missed out on the part, I think, that the Baldrige Criteria help with, which is creating a culture that is not just a set a tools to make changes—it’s actually a culture of how you do business and how you work and what you value." He noted that Baldrige has a set of Core Values, other companies may have principles that they follow. One important lesson from decades past, he said, is that you can have a toolbox and fix everything, but you need to establish a culture with common, shared values to make those changes last. "You’ve got to have innovative, creative thinking because [the market] is moving at such a pace. . . . You’ve got to think outside of the box, but at the same time, you’ve got to have a culture and core values. If you’ve got that, you can introduce new things. And people know how to approach them. They don’t go out and just blindly follow a process. They know how to approach [a process/new idea], analyze it. They know how to put scientific data around it; make sure it’s doing what they want it to do." Collaboration is also critical for businesses today, he said; "your delivery [of products to the market] is just the admission ticket to the competitive environment. Collaboration and innovation are now the discriminators in that environment. Being able to act like you’re a bigger company because you’ve got partners, you’ve got a network. . . . [Through collaboration with universities, other companies, etc., you can] produce things that separately might take years to do; together they can do it in less [time, with less resources]." Patterson learned the hard way about the difficulties of not having a common culture and core values through his experience with a large merger in the defense industry. Multiple companies were brought together, but the new workforce had different vantage points. "We were in a situation where we realized we couldn’t even figure out how to go and improve something because we each did [it differently. Eventually] we created a common culture, but it was out of necessity, and it was forced on us." He added, "I believe most people want to do a good job . . . but if you don’t have that common culture then it’s hard to ever pull that off. I’ve done a lot of improvement activities in my career in different facilities where the CEO was detached from what was going on. He would say . . . just go fix that, but those fixes don’t last. . . . You can get some results immediately, but two-three years later, they’re starting to fall off and go away because there’s no supporting mechanism." Regarding the Baldrige Excellence Framework and its Criteria, Patterson said he has been surprised and pleased at how the Baldrige Criteria "morphed" the way they did, with an increased focus on core values rather than just on process discipline. "It’s not just about how well you execute what you’re doing. It’s about how you create the culture that continues to execute no matter the process. And it’s everything from the CEO to the janitor who understands how to approach issues and problems, understands how to approach their work, and has appreciation for each other’s roles. . . . I was really pleased when I saw that [the Baldrige Criteria have] changed over time and have matured that process and product focus to [an updated framework] that I think has sustainable and long-term, lasting value and can continue to." Patterson, who worked at Texas Instruments, Inc., in 1992 when it received the Baldrige Award, said he was once part of a focus group for medical professionals who were trying to develop technology for the future. "The medical field was interested in the future of dentistry, but they used a bunch of us who were not dentists to tell them what the future was," to provide an outside perspective. "What I tell people is you ought to use the Baldrige Criteria to turn a mirror on yourself. You don’t have to win a Baldrige Award. . . . The real key is that you can put that mirror on yourself and get some examiners to come in and evaluate what you’re doing because sometimes it’s hard for you to do this. It’s an excellent criteria [framework that helps you say] you’re doing a lot of the right things, but here are some areas where you can improve." Patterson’s advice today to manufacturers and other organizations: Stick with early successes, focus on the future, and get a sustainable culture with core values in place. "Our culture here in the United States is to see a problem and go fix it and make [the product/process] better and better and better," Patterson added. "But we never look up to see if the problem is even still out there. . . . Strategic thinking is key in there. Every year, you have to think what does the future look like. And if that’s what the future looks like, what are the attributes we have to have to succeed in that future. . . . You don’t want to be focused on your market. You want to be focused on the future and what markets are out there and see what parts you can play in them."

Posted by Harry Hertz, the Baldrige Cheermudgeon Have you ever pondered this question? I didn’t in a global sense until recently. I’ve had the same experiences you have with having my car hit and then feeling like I did wrong with all the hoops the responsible person’s insurance company made me go through. But I never generalized that situation…until now. A few recent incidents brought this to light for me. A colleague bought something on-line and the seller shipped the wrong item. When the seller was contacted they required the wrong item be returned before the correct item would be shipped and the return postage refunded. The seller made the mistake. Why didn’t they offer to send a replacement immediately with a return shipping label for the incorrect item? My car was recently subject to a manufacturer’s recall. I had experienced the problem that triggered the recall. Even though the recall was on the national news, it took another two months until I got the recall notice to bring the car to a dealer. The recall notice described exactly what had happened to me (four times). I made an appointment and brought the car in. The service representative required me to sign a $150 diagnostic fee to be refunded if the problem was triggered by only the recall notice. I told them if the problem was greater it was triggered by the multiple times I experienced the failure. They should have been apologizing to me for the defect, not trying to get money for additional repairs. When I submitted a negative review in the on-line survey that followed the recall repair, I was immediately called by the service manager. He insisted that the approval for a diagnostic charge was necessary to protect them from a liability suit if the problem was something other than the recall item. I explained that if liability were a concern the recall letter should have been issued immediately and not months after the recall was announced. He continued to argue. I politely hung up! Who should have been protected in this situation, the dealer or me? We are in the process of buying some real estate. After having a signed contract by us and the seller, the seller decided they weren’t interested in selling and were not honoring the terms of the contract. The real estate agents started action to protect their commission if the seller reneged. I was told I could get a lawyer to fight for my interests. I am the customer, but the agents are focused only on their financial interests! In all these incidents, the "good guy" is made to suffer. For making a purchase that benefits the seller, you are turned into an innocent victim with inappropriate consequences. In the Leadership Category, the  Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence ask about creating and balancing value for customers and other stakeholders. In the Customers Category, the Criteria ask about building customer relationships to acquire customers, build market share, and enhance brand image. Do we need to add notes about victims’ rights or how not to victimize your customers and stakeholders? Think about your own experiences. How often are each of us turned into innocent victims? What about your organization? Do you unintentionally make victims out of some of your customers or stakeholders?

Posted by Christine Schaefer In 2007, the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC; PDF profile) became the first U.S. federal organization to receive the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Located at Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey, ARDEC had been using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence (part of the Baldrige Excellence Framework) since 1994 on its journey to excellence. Although ARDEC has had many changes in leadership over the past two decades, it continues to use the Baldrige framework and principles to make improvements and support high performance, according to Joseph (Joe) Brescia, ARDEC’s director for strategic management and process improvement. Brescia said that at conferences where he has presented on using the Baldrige framework, "the question we always get is, ‘with many changes in leadership, how do we ensure that we have continuity in terms of maintaining momentum and continuous improvement?’ At ARDEC, we’ve always had the perspective that leaders have to be the unequivocal champions of quality. Our focus has always been, ‘What are we going to do next?’ So there’s always a focus on continuous improvement. That’s an enduring principle of [ARDEC] leadership: that you focus on continual improvement." At both of this month’s regional Baldrige conferences in Nashville, Tennessee, and Denver, Colorado, Brescia and James (Jim) Caiazzo, team leader for the Office of Strategic Management at ARDEC, will be presenting on their organization’s leadership principles, showing how they are linked to the Baldrige Criteria. In a recent phone interview, Brescia and Caiazzo answered questions about their upcoming presentation and their organization. Following are highlights of that interview. How does the Baldrige framework support your organization’s leadership practices and performance? "We found that leaders who demonstrate principle-centered leadership more effectively link mission, vision, values, strategy, structure, and systems to foster a culture of continuous improvement based on trust, respect, and empowerment," said Brescia. "The principal takeaway" for those who attend the ARDEC session at this year’s Baldrige regional conferences, Brescia said, is that the organization’s "development of strong leadership principles is firmly embedded in the Baldrige Criteria and is essential for sustained superior performance." Caiazzo said, "We’ve combined some of the principles of Baldrige that you find in the [Baldrige Criteria] category entitled ‘Leadership’ with the principles of the U.S. Army and its leadership development program and process." "Those principles are based on what is called the Department of the Army Doctrine as represented by Field Manual (FM) 6-22. It contains all the principles we feel are important that are inextricably linked to category 1," continued Caiazzo. "For instance, category 1 talks to how important the mission and the vision and the principles and values are; and in our own leadership development program, we emphasize those right up front." A slide from ARDEC’s upcoming conference presentation depicts the organization’s integration of the Baldrige framework and the U.S. Army’s leadership development principles. Slide provided by ARDEC. In regard to the Baldrige emphasis on continuous improvement, Caiazzo pointed out that the Army Field Manual 6-22, "Army Leadership, Competent, Confident, and Agile," defines leadership as "the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization." Therefore, he said, "the whole principle and concept of improvement is the central theme to our three-tier leadership development courses." Among other ways that ARDEC has continued to use Baldrige in its improvement efforts, Caiazzo described how the organization this year adapted and used the online Baldrige Criteria-based surveys Are We Making Progress/Are We Making Progress as Leaders? After customizing the questions for the organization, he said surveys were given to both managers and employees to identify improvement opportunities. The organization is now conducting focus groups based on the survey results. And "each of the 20 units within ARDEC is coming up with a plan on ways to improve on gaps identified," said Caiazzo. What are a few key reasons that organizations in your sector can benefit from using the Baldrige framework? "We found that the Criteria are applicable to any organization, public or private, large or small," said Brescia. "Successful organizations, wherever they may come from, tend to have great leadership teams, maintain a high-performing workforce, develop and deploy effective business strategies, know their customers as well as their competitors, have very disciplined work processes, and are typically very data- and results-driven. Now, if that sounds familiar, that [is because those elements] represent the seven categories of the Baldrige Criteria. So it really doesn’t matter whether you’re profit-driven, focused on maximizing shareholder value, or like us in the public sector … focused on executing our mission effectively and efficiently: those key seven areas are applicable no matter what your organization’s type or sector." Added Caiazzo, "Baldrige provides a turnkey solution to looking at an organization with a degree of objectivity as to what’s truly important for accomplishing its own mission." According to Brescia, another benefit for organizations that adopt the Baldrige Criteria is that "it’s a really good framework for building business acumen within your workforce. And business acumen is one of the key characteristics of great leadership. In other words, understanding how the different facets of your organization work together to deliver outstanding results for the customer is really critical to developing your future leadership. … In the public sector or the private sector, it’s a very beneficial way of building that business acumen in the workforce at every level." What are a few tips for others about using the Baldrige framework to make improvements and achieve excellence across an organization? "Step number-one in change management is always for leaders to establish a sense of urgency," said Brescia. "Baldrige is a vehicle for establishing and maintaining transformational change in your organization. The responsibility of great leaders is to align the mission, vision, and values within the organization. Paint the vision of what change looks like and how the Baldrige framework gets you there." "Use the Baldrige Criteria to provide a common language to discuss improvement," Caiazzo said, "so that everyone is using the same vernacular." "Make sure you focus on results," said Brescia. "In other words, the way to institutionalize the Baldrige framework is to actually use it to manage the business. That comes down to establishing a formal venue for senior leadership to review results and make changes as required. This way, when you do have changes in leadership, with the venue institutionalized, it doesn’t live and die with the leadership that started it." Join us at the 2015 Baldrige Regional Conferences to attend this session and many more from 2014 and other Baldrige Award recipients.