The BaldrigePlus Newsletter
Issue 21, Sunday June 11th, 2000
Back to (Baldrige) basics
With Leadership, and leadership-driven areas like strategy, innovation and ethics, now getting heavy-duty treatment in their own dedicated email magazine, we'll concentrate for a few issues on the remainder of your organization's activities – those covered by the other four Baldrige categories: customers and markets, human resources, information and analysis, and process management.
Hal Moyers at Shaw Resources produces a weekly newsletter on customer relationship issues. Doesn't usually run to more tan 400 words. My judgement is that it's intended to be entry-level (and sell Shaw Resources' services). If you're putting together a “Baldrige' application, for whatever purpose and at whatever level of expertise, you'll find a quick skim of Hal's comments worth-while. Here's the latest, on managing complaints:
Walking in your customers' shoes - customer complaints
”We believe that customer complaints are important. We even tell clients that we will make sure they get more complaints.
“Managers often report that complaints are down which implies they are doing a better job. Better job of what? A lower number of complaints may just mean you did a bad job of collecting them.
“Remember customers who complain are giving you a second chance. The people that gave up on you are long gone to competition. Complainers may be giving you a second chance [because] you have a more convenient location. Or, the customers may like some of what you do but want you to do better.
“There is a local Italian restaurant that has screwed up the same salad twice. We want them to do better. We keep ordering the same salad. They do such a good job of other dishes and handle our complaints so well we keep going back. They did not lose us as a customer, yet. What the restaurant has not been able to do is use the complaint to improve their salad making system. At some point we may give up on them. They have a successful competitor down the street that has never screwed up a meal and that competitor will suck up any customers dissatisfied with the first restaurant.
“Complaints exist whether you have a system to gather them and use them or not. In a high touch business, how you handle a complaint is as important as how you use the complaint to improve operations. You will get more from complaints by using them to improve operations and not just make sure the complaining customer is happy. If you do neither [you] may be driving customers away and end up in an organizational death spiral.
“Take a hard look at how your organization is trained to handle complaints and how you use them to improve operations.”
Shaw Resources sell process management expertise, and also provide a wide range of on-line resources. This is not an endorsement – we've never used any of the firm's proprietary products, and have no financial interests.
To subscribe send an email to Hal@ShawResources.com
What 'getting it' means
From www.clickz.com
Past readers will know that we've been wondering, here at Baldrigeplus, about whether the Baldrige approach to organisational high performance will translate successfully into the new economy. There's a fundamental conflict between the need to innovate and improvise, and the process-obsessed old-economy emphasis of 'Baldrige.'
Here's an interesting narrative on some other differences that leaders of long-run, stable, mature, bricks and mortar firms might like to think about as they work through their year 2000 'Baldrige' applications:
Someone recently asked Clikz columnist Jeffrey Graham what people mean when they say, in relation to Internet marketing, that someone 'gets it.' They knew that 'getting it' roughly equates to being 'in the know.' But what, they asked him, is the 'it' to get?
“It's a tough question to answer, because there's a lot involved in understanding the Internet.” Jeffrey wrote, “My best attempt to explain it is that 'getting it' means understanding how the Internet is profoundly different from the communication and marketing channels that came before it.
“The best place to start to understand “it” is www.CyberGeography.org. There you can see, in visual representations, how the Internet is a network of interconnected worlds, unlike anything that came before it. A big part of a marketer's job is to spread messages about brands and products. As an online marketer, looking at these maps helps you realize what type of environment the messages you create need to thrive in - a multi-dimensional universe that has completely undermined traditional ways of marketing to customers,” he wrote.
Before the Internet, marketing communication was about broadcast channels, one way, to a mass audience. How effective you were at brand creation and broadcasting your key marketing messages was directly proportional to the amount of money spent on advertising.
The Internet changed all that. Customers are now inter-connected. Marketers no longer control the way brands are talked about. Sites like Deja.com and epinions.com aggregate consumers and allow them to compare notes about products and services. The increase in the speed and reach of word-of-mouth is incalculable.
Successful marketing is now about managing the on-line dialogue among everyone who contacts your brand.
The concept of brands changes too. The brand experience no longer simply conveys a feeling toward a product or brand, built via advertising and interaction with a product. Brands are now entwined with service, delivery, availability of product, and other measures of value. For example, when the Levi's site doesn't answer an email or offer products on its site, that impacts the customer's perception of the brand. Brands have depth and are part of multiple points of contact.
“There's a lot that goes into understanding what makes the Internet different,” Jeffrey Graham wrote, “I'm still trying to figure it out. But I do know that 'getting it' means understanding how the Internet is a sea-change from the past.
Application examples
Here at Baldrigeplus we're often asked for examples of completed applications, presumably so that application teams can compare their work to past winners.
We're only aware of one complete, 50-page application in the public arena (we have several more in our files, but they're not public documents), and that's actually the US Army's Fort Benning President's Hammer Award (exactly the same criteria, but open to US government organizations).
There are a number of 20-page application summaries available on the internet, and three from the 1998 winners are included below:
Want to know what a Baldrige winning application looks like?
This may be as near as you'll get. Solar Turbines' (a 1998 winner) 20-page application summary is available here. Essentially, it's a full summary with the commercially sensitive and proprietary information edited out. A valuable resource - thanks Solar!
Two-times Baldrige winner (1991 and 1997),
Solectron has also put it's application summary on-line as a downloadable file. For a detailed look at what motivates a Baldrige winner, this site (and the summary) is also an excellent resource.
The Texas Nameplate Company is the smallest organization ever to win a Baldrige Award (1998). Their application summary is available as a downloadable PDF.
Fort Benning's 1997 President's Award application The full 50 pages, this is a complete application, Baldrige in all but name (the two awards use the same words). A rare resource.
These links are from my resources at US Quality Magazine Quality Today (www.qualitytoday.com), click on the Library tab and go to Baldrige Award.
The value of these examples are the pointers they provide to specific answers to Baldrige questions. If you wonder what a particular area to address response looks like, check one of these for some best practice examples. My site material attempts to do the same thing, and includes extended case studies of eight past Baldrige winners, including Solar, Solectron, and TNC.
And don't forget NIST, The Home of Baldrige. Start here for the latest versions of the Criteria for Performance Excellence (the Baldrige criteria) for business, education and healthcare; plus press releases, frequently asked questions, the history of the award, summaries of all past winners and much more.
Human resource focus
We've used material from MCB University Press Ltd's monthly newsletter Emerald Now (http://www.mcb.co.uk/emrld/now/) a number of times in the past, and enthusiastically recommend it. This month editor Sarah Powell's extended interview (about 3,500 words) is with Professor Manfred Kets de Vries, on the interface between psychoanalysis/dynamic psychiatry and management, distinct organizational types, cultural approaches to management, and life balance.
Manfred Kets de Vries holds the Raoul de Vitry d'Avaucourt Chair in Human Resource Management and is Clinical Professor of Management and Leadership at the European Institute of Business Administration (INSEAD). He is also Programme Director of INSEAD's top management programme: "The Challenge of Leadership: Developing your Emotional Intelligence". He has received INSEAD's distinguished teacher award five times. Dr Kets de Vries has held professorships at McGill University, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales in Montreal, and Harvard Business School. He has lectured at management institutions worldwide, and has acted as consultant in organizational design/transformation and strategic human resource management for leading US, Canadian, European, African and Asian companies.
Powell asked him about, for example, integrating ideas from a number of disciplines and employing psychoanalysis as a method of investigation of organizational behaviour, asking “How open are today's leaders to this approach to management relations … do some feel threatened at the personal analysis that this involves?”
She also asked about the interface between psychoanalysis/dynamic psychiatry and management … the relationship between personality, leadership style and organization form, about emotional intelligence as “the fruit of an inner journey of self-discovery, and crucial to the development of an empathy with others.”
“Are some cultures more likely to produce successful global leaders?” She asked. And “How do leadership styles differ according to culture?” And “Do women have a natural advantage in leadership terms given the "softer" management skills now advocated?”
“Most of your work focuses on the dynamics at work within organizations. Given the growing trend towards outsourcing, how can fruitful relationships and mutual trust be fostered with suppliers who are likely to work at a distance and have little, if any, personal contact with the organization?”
Manfred Kets de Vries is author, co-author or editor of 15 books including The Neurotic Organization: Diagnosing and Changing Counter-Productive Styles of Management (1984, new edition 1990, with Danny Miller), Unstable at the Top (1988, with Danny Miller), Life and Death in the Executive Fast Lane: Essays on Organizations and Leadership (1995) (The Critics' Choice Award 1995-96), The New Global Leaders: Percy Barnevik, Richard Branson, and David Simon (1999, with Elizabeth Florent), and Struggling with the Demon: Perspectives on Individual and Organizational Irrationality (2000). Dr Kets de Vries is currently working on a book, based on his lectures, entitled The Leadership Mystique. These books can be ordered through www.amazon.com.
KM
And finally, if you're interested in knowledge management, check out the results of a recent APQC benchmarking effort revealing a model outlining the various stages of successful knowledge management implementation. An in-depth look at each stage are now available. Download the executive summary FREE from http://www.store.apqc.org/impkm.cfm
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.