Your Community Needs Baldrige Criteria and MassExcellence
Twenty years ago the mayor of a major U.S. city said that to work systematically on quality improvement and excellence was good management but not yet good politics. What about now? Is now the right time time to make excellence good politics and good management in our organizations, communities, and nations? If you think it is, we invite you to join us.
Excellence in life and excellence in politics is difficult work. It may be something of a structural entitlement in the United States but it doesn't just happen. Excellence in the workplace and in society requires the mature participation of the whole community to design and achieve a good result. Excellence, as Aristotle noted long before the competitive global economy was created, is a habit. Excellence is created by the right attitude, the right design, and the right work.
In a free world excellence has to be desired by many and the many have to participate in the leadership and management for the good of the individual and the community. That's what the idea of democracy is all about and our founders risked their freedom and lives, even moreso than the current "occupy" movement in political protests and deliberations, to make it happen. To be able to keep a democracy, as Ben Franklin noted, is to participate in maintaining it.
In today's complex social and economic environment the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence can give people a powerful leadership and management tool for creating excellence. We can think of the Baldrige Criteria as a first-aid kit, a diagnostic tool-box, a design and maintenance process, for seeing how your organization is running and what it is doing. The Baldrige Criteria is a virtual toolbox with Seven Leadership and Management Tools:
- Organizational Leadership Tool
- Organizational Management Tool
- Organizational Development Tool
- Quality & Process Improvement Tool
- Organizational Systems-Thinking Tool
- Organizational Self-Assessment Tool
- External Check and Feedback Generation Tool
Over the past two decades, the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence has evolved in a well-managed public-private sector partnership to a point where it offers a good framework to first be able to see—and then be able to decide—how to deal with the leadership and management problems our organizations and institutions are living in and with. The Baldrige program has evolved from a simplistic quality-award program to a complex organizational excellence program that integrates quality, OD, and systems thinking into a holistic participative management approach that recognizes the need for a triple-bottom line of people, planet, and profits. The Baldrige Criteria offers leaders a lens and a mirror to see what's what and provides a framework to make things better. It is not perfect but it is constantly monitored and improved as an ongoing public-private partnership managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
MassExcellence can be a valuable partner for you in using the seven tools of the Baldrige Criteria. We can help in two ways:
1. We can provide you with the external check and feedback report. When you become an applicant in the MassExcellence Performance Excellence Awards Program you will complete a detailed application, answering the detailed questions contained in the Criteria. Then our trained examiners will carefully review your application, conduct a site visit, and prepare a feedback report listing what it sees as your key strengths and key opportunities for improvement. (Click here for more information.)
2. We can provide some of your key people with a special expertise into how the Baldrige Criteria works, and to be part of a team that examines another organization and writes a feedback report for them. That knowledge and experience not only helps another organization, it provides an insight and skill to help your own organization that is not otherwise available. (Click here for more information.)
The Future Step: Total Community Excellence
The Baldrige Criteria is like a responsible and wise elder. It is a mature leadership tool for guiding people to think in terms of their organization's intentions, processes, systems, and outcomes.
It can guide us toward a higher vision, a vision of 360-degree excellence, a vision of total organizational excellence, even total community excellence. Anything less diminishes all our dally lives because we're much more highly interdependent today than ever before. The Baldrige Criteria and MassExcellence provides a pathway to a better present for ourselves and a better future for our children and grandchildren. We invite you to join us on this journey to excellence in our lives, our organizations, and our communities.
