The BaldrigePlus Newsletter
Issue 20, Monday May 29th, 2000
Announcement
LEADERSHIP NEWSLETTER
This issue is the 20th! It’s review and refocus time.
As announced last week, from issue 21 we’ll publish this newsletter every two weeks, and alternate with a paid-subscription newsletter dedicated to leadership.
Why leadership?
- It’s the topic that generates by far the greatest response from our readers
- It’s THE key to success in the new economy
- And there’s a gap in the market
- Early response has been great. We’re keen to go, and lots of people seem to keen to see what we produce
- If you've got friends or acquaintances who might be interested, do me a favour - please - and bounce this newsletter along to them.
We’ll cover the practice and principles of leadership. The key responsibilities - strategy, innovation and ethics. Leadership for everyone (hey, we’re all leaders, right?). Assessment - of leaders and leadership systems - and continuous improvement. Self improvement tools and techniques. Case studies. Heroic and charismatic leaders. New-economy leadership. Political leadership. And we’ll point you to resources - book and article reviews, links, networks.
Here’s the deal. We'll offer two free issues and a unique Baldrige-derived assessment tool to everyone on this Newsletter’s distribution list. We’ll invoice you after two issues - and only email further copies if you choose to pay.
Check it out free, get the assessment tool, and if the first two issues don’t do it for you, just don’t pay. Simple, risk free.
Reinventing the (Baldrige) wheel (1)
Baldrige enthusiasts inclined to paranoia must find it hard not to feel that the whole world is agin them. Take two articles in recent issues of the Harvard Business Review and ASQ's Quality Progress - publications of record if ever there were.
Each article discusses quality and process concepts that are important in the Baldrige criteria. Neither mentions Baldrige. It’s a puzzle why this should be so - were the authors ignorant of Baldrige, or part of a conspiracy to bury the award (I’m nearly being serious here folks!)?
Let’s start with Gerald F Smith's 'Too many types of Quality Problems' in the April 2000 issue of Quality Progress. It helps to solve problems, Smith says, if you start with a taxonomy - a scheme for classifying problems - to direct you towards likely solutions. Various taxonomies have been proposed in the past, apparently, with little impact on practice - on what people actually do. He mentions several, but apparently doesn’t consider the Baldrige criteria a ‘taxonomy.’
Needing to begin somewhere, Smith began with Frederick Nickols, who considered three approaches to problem-solving ; repair - restoring a system to its intended function; improvement - so that performance goals are achieved; and engineering - the design of new systems or solutions. These deal with what Smith calls performance systems, which he says have two classes of problems - those related to design and those related to performance. If you’re familiar with Baldrige category six, Process Management, bells will already be ringing.
Smith examined more than 1,000 published case studies in search of empirical evidence of a functional grouping of quality problems, finding five sub-categories; conformance problems, unstructured performance problems, efficiency problems, product design problems and process design problems. Not all organisational problems are ‘quality’ problems, he says - there are also decision problems, negotiation problems and resource allocation problems, among others.
I’m not saying Smith’s article (and the book and research papers that lie behind it) is a waste of time. It’s instructive to look for patterns, and explore what help they might offer. There are some useful insights which make this article well worth reading - about unstructured performance problems, stakeholder interests and customer perspectives, for example.
But the Baldrige criteria already offer a well-established ‘taxonomy,’ some parts of which closely map to Smith’s ‘discoveries.’ He seems to have been intent on re-inventing a wheel that’s already been rolling for a decade, but he's missed half the spokes.
Reinventing the (Baldrige) wheel (2)
The second article (Balancing Act: How to capture knowledge without killing it, Harvard Business Review, May-June 2000), begins by saying that history will pity the managers of the 1990s because “The Internet touched down in their midst like a tornado, tearing up the old game book, disrupting every aspect of business, and compelling them to manage for a new economy.” The authors - one a scientist (and director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre), the other a historian and social theorist (at UCLA Berkeley and PARC) - say that when managers sought help, they found the experts offering two radically different theories about what such management should look like.
About here - right in the first paragraph - I began to have my doubts. The two approaches were apparently reengineering and knowledge management. Don’t know about you, but I thought the history of business in the late twentieth century was a bit richer, and somewhat less black and white, than that. They’ve got the timing a bit wrong as well.
Reengineering, according to Brown and Duguid (also, incidentally, the authors of 'The Social Life of Information,' a Harvard Business School Press publication - from which this article derives), is a top-down “structured coordination of people and information” that assumes organisations compete in a predictable environment. Knowledge management is bottom-up, they say, based on how people actually get things done, and assumes organisations compete in an unpredictable environment.
Well, OK, we could have an interesting discussion about all those points. They certainly don’t match my experience and observations. “Of course,” the authors carry on, “management fads shift all the time (how else could consultants stay in business?) but we think this shift from process reengineering to knowledge management represents something more substantial than a change of fashion. It suggests a dilemma that all managers grapple with: the … tension between process, the way matters are formally organised, and practice, the way things actually get done.”
Aha, I thought, now I understand. These guys don’t have a clue how organisations really work. The words of Rufus White from the Baldrige-winning Boeing Airlift and Tanker plant at Long Beach, CA - “everything around here is a process” - immediately came to mind.
Why does this matter? It’s my guess that these two writers are not familiar with the Baldrige criteria. They’ve not put much thought into a 'what happens in workplaces' taxonomy and they’ve constructed their argument on a false (or at least simplistic) premise. Or maybe (Aha number two) they’ve assumed that what quality managers write in ISO 9000 or QMS manuals is actually intended to accurately represent what happens. They may have assumed that because what’s written down and what gets done sometimes diverge, there are two separate phenomena at play.
Sure, there’s a need to balance the certainty of a well-mapped process with impromptu or emergent opportunities for innovation. And every workplace is full of problem-specific heuristics - Gerald Smith’s “informal, quick and dirty methods or pieces of advice [that are the] key to expert performance in almost every field of practice.” But that doesn’t mean there are two distinct phenomena at work. It just means we’re often not very good at describing what really happens, so we simplify and approximate.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Their explanation of how new knowledge and best practice emerges, and is captured for reuse, among Xerox service reps provides a model for behaviour and process design that many new economy organisations will find valuable. And their comments about rewarding high performance in collaborative organisations where new knowledge creation is a key to success are also well worth the time it takes to read and think about this article.
Both of these narratives are valuable, offer new and useful insights, and reward careful reading. But both would have benefited greatly, in my view, if they’d been grounded in something solid and well understood, and if the writers had resisted the temptation to reinvent the wheel or oversimplify the real world. Starting from a Baldrige framework would have added value, context, richness and utility.
Note on internet addresses
Rather than live links, we've included the adddresses to off-site resources in full - cut and past to your browser.