Management Week in Review for March 18, 2011

March 18, 2011 By 2 Comments

Note from Art: every week, I share three thought-provoking management posts for the week. Fair warning: I take a broad view of management, so my selections will range from leadership to innovation to finance and personal development and beyond.

This week’s selections feature content on why you need to know more about Baldrige, rethinking your ideas on measuring marketing ROI and the powerful impact of Social Business on your firm’s reputation and ultimate success.

-From Steve George at Baldrige.com, Baldrige Benefits the U.S. While not the official website for Baldrige, Steve George has developed a remarkable treasure trove of information, services and helpful resources for this important and grossly under-marketed program.

In this time of remarkable challenge for businesses in the U.S. and around the world, Baldrige offers a powerful framework for planning, leading and managing your business. It’s not a silver bullet, but unless you’ve read the latest Criteria for Performance Excellence and looked at the free tools and studied how others are applying this program, you are ill informed, like much/most of the population. The piss-poor marketing of this program by our government actually makes me angry. (I’ve offered to help fix it.)  OK, off my soapbox on this one. Check out Steve’s site and check out the Criteria and other info at the official site.

From the post: “Interest in Baldrige has remained consistent for twenty years, with bumps in attention when healthcare and education criteria and awards were added, but it has never really caught on in executive suites and boardrooms across America. Those organizations that have integrated Baldrige know how well it works, but they remain a small minority in a country that could truly benefit from the Baldrige model.”

-From David Meerman Scott at WebInkNow, Marketing ROI and What You Should Measure. David just keeps cranking out remarkable and remarkably helpful material for all of us as we experiment with the many new tools of marketing. In this one, David suggests that it’s time to rethink our traditional approaches to measuring marketing performance. There’s a bit of Deming’s “unknown and unknowable” in his observations on why this is not as simple as counting followers or likes on Facebook. I always read David’s posts for the main course and then loop back for the comments with dessert.

From the post: “Now we can earn attention by creating and publishing online for free something interesting and valuable: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, an e-book, a Facebook page. But how should we measure the success of this new kind of marketing? The answer is that we need new metrics. I’m critical of applying old forms of offline measurement to online marketing.

From Bret L. Simmons at Positive Organizational Behavior: Ugly Customer Service is Bad Social Business. Bret is quickly becoming a major voice in the Social Business arena, and he’s someone I learn from daily. One of the things I love about many of his posts is his propensity to connect social media/social business with how we live, learn and choose. In the example here, Bret showcases how dumb-ass marketing and stupid comments from poorly trained representatives can turn into bad outcomes for the business at the speed of  a tweet…or at least a post.

From the post: “As I’ve said before, service providers will fail from time to time. I’m fine with that. But when a paying customer – especially a loyal one – gives you the opportunity to address what they think was a service failure, you better provide impressive service recovery. If you don’t recover in the eyes of the customer, you earned both the loss of their business and the bad word of mouth marketing they will spread about your business in their increasingly connected social networks. Ugly customer service is very bad for social business.”

–

Ok, that’s it for the week. I’ll be back on Monday with a new Leadership Caffeine to help you jump-start your week.

And I’m excited to be releasing my new Decision-Making workshop program next week. I’ve run the early versions with great success in association and organizational settings and I’m looking for teams and groups interested in improving performance immediately with this critical and often highly flawed process.  You can reach me on this or any other of my workshop, consulting or speaking offerings via e-mail. I look forward to helping!


Filed Under: Leadership, Marketing, Performance Tagged With: , , , ,

Sustaining Performance Excellence in Business and in Life

November 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

It genuinely bothers me when organizations spend years and untold dollars reinventing themselves and succeeding with a quality framework (i.e. Baldrige or Six Sigma) only to show up in the business press as an organization fighting for survival.

It’s like the obese person with one foot in the grave suddenly committing to health on America’s Biggest Loser and at the end of the program, successfully completing a marathon. For a moment, life is good and our belief in our capacity to do anything that we set our mind to, restored.  Certainly the experience and lessons-learned during the successful journey to improve have changed this individual’s life for the better.  And then, we glance at the tabloid cover in the grocery store checkout line to see a picture of this fat then fit and now fat again individual working out with a box of Krispy Kremes.

I wrote a related post a few days ago with the harsh title of Change or Die, and upon second thought, the title should have been: Change & Sustain or Die. Organizations and people are fairly adept at changing for a moment at the end of a gun barrel, but they are not so good at sustaining the change when the barrel is no longer pointing their way.

  • There’s the former Baldrige winner that lost their CEO in an untimely passing.  The new leader took a cost cutting mentality and ended up cutting out programs and people critical to the organization’s focus on performance excellence.  The ensuing performance included a stint in bankruptcy.  That’s a bad case of the Baldrige Blues.
  • Motorola is given large credit for helping create the Six Sigma Quality framework.  Their focus on process improvement and their Baldrige award are legendary and define the culture.  The company is fighting for survival, mired down in completely forgetting the Voice of the Customer in pursuit of endless elegant iterations of cell phones that no one wants.  Their imbalanced scorecard had them losing $12 for every device they sold last quarter and burning through billions with a “b” in cash over the last year.
  • Ford.  Enough said.
  • GM, don’t get me started.

It’s not like Toyota withheld key information about the legendary Toyota Production System and the many other business practices that they learned by applying Deming’s principles, studying the writings of Henry Ford and the unique innovations in the operations of early supermarkets in the U.S.

  • Circuit City.  See ya.  (OK, this one is unfair…they never achieved any form of recognizable Performance Excellence.)

The Bottom-Line For Now on Sustaining Performance Excellence

Leadership is always an issue when it comes to performance, and in my opinion, it is THE issue when it comes to sustaining excellence.  The various Quality frameworks offer essential directions for the never-ending journey in pursuit of creating value and continuously improving, but the secrete is that there is no final destination.

Achieving milestones and winning awards helps reinforce the progress on the journey, but leaders at all levels have to foster a culture that is perpetually dissatisfied. The fact is that the market never sleeps, customer issues/needs change constantly and there are always competitors interested in taking your share of the customer’s budget.

An MBA student reminded me the other night of Andy Grove’s (Intel) classic book and philosophy: Only the Paranoid Survive.  Perhaps we should work on a Balanced Scorecard measure for Paranoia.  Actually, that raises an interesting question.  What do your metrics and measures and scorecards truly tell you about whether you are continuing the upward climb or falling backwards, potentially into oblivion?

Hey leaders, wake up.  Someone’s going to have you for lunch while you are busy basking in the glow of your latest quality award.  And speaking of lunch, do you know how long it will take you to work off that piece of carrot cake?  Just say no to the dessert and get to the gym tonight.  You’re looking a little pudgy.

Another related post: Does Your Dashboard of Performance Measures Include a Warning Light?

Filed Under: Leadership Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Does Your City Government Treat You Like a Customer?

October 31, 2008 By Leave a Comment

This is my pre-election post on government, and I promise to stay focused on performance and not politics.  There’s enough hot air being expended by the candidates and pundits and I don’t need to add to the global warming.  However, it does seem like a good time for all of us to evaluate the return we are getting from government and frankly, ask for more.  And by more, I don’t mean more money or even government. I mean quality, performance, results, and yes, even a bit of good old-fashioned customer treatment.

A great example of government delivering on its responsibilities for its customers…yes, I said customers, is 2007 Malcolm Baldrige Award Winner, Coral Springs, Florida.  The city of Coral Springs won a Baldrige Award for Performance Excellence, a feat that is remarkable for even the best of businesses.

A little bit of background on this post.  I am working with a talented group of MBA students at DePaul University in Chicago studying the Baldrige program as a framework for performance excellence.  We are looking at the practices and results of great companies in all sectors of the economy,  and the idea of performance excellence in government seemed like a fitting pre-election topic.  As a group, we struggled to recall if and when we had ever felt like “customers” much less “satisfied customers” in our dealings with our community governments.

As an aside, most people mistakenly associate Baldrige with just quality, when in fact it is one of the most comprehensive programs in the world in challenging and guiding organizations to become great at creating value for stakeholders.  Of course, quality in all facets is at the center of this high performance formula.  Coral Springs is the only municipal government to win this award to-date, and offers some powerful lessons for all of our communities as we head to the polls to elect our leaders next week.

A few noteworthy points:

  • Coral Springs truly views its citizens and businesses as customers and designs all of its services to maximize customer satisfaction.  From Saturday hours to their “City Hall in the Mall” facility that provides added convenience for people going about their normal business.
  • The city is a model of strategic planning effectiveness, engaging stakeholders in the development of a strategic plan and importantly, the development and execution of this plan around clearly defined goals and objectives.
  • Continuous improvement is inherent in this community’s emphasis on measurement and control of critical processes.  From customer satisfaction to employee and volunteer satisfaction, to focusing on measuring, monitoring and improving around the processes that create value for citizens and businesses, Coral Springs runs like you would expect the most quality conscious business to run.
  • The results are clear and visible for all to see in the form of ongoing reporting of key performance indicators to remarkable achievements in delivering what the customers deemed important in a high-performance community.  From schools to traffic to safety, the community appears to have achieved results that most communities will envy.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

If you are intrigued and want more tangible information on what a city government looks like when it clearly identifies its customers and holds itself accountable to creating value for those customers, take a look at the Baldrige Video at the city’s website. Do yourself a favor and watch the long-form of the video, preferably before you head off to the polls to elect or re-elect your city officials.  Better yet, send these officials a link and ask them if they understand who their customers are and what you expect.  Perhaps if we all hold our officials accountable, we might just get a reasonable return for our investment.  About now, any form of positive return would be good.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,