Deck 11: Performance Excellence and Organizational Change

Question 1

For each of the core values of the Baldrige criteria, describe some practices that you would expect to see high-performing organizations implement.

Answer 1

Below are some practices that you might expect a high performing organization to implement for each of the Baldrige Award core values:
1. Delivery of ever-improving value to customers, contributing to marketplace success.
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management) technology , a software system designed to help companies segment markets, track sales, identify and eliminate non-value-adding products, etc.
• Customer information - a good way to collect information about customers to be able to predict their needs, do market research, etc.
• Concept Engineering
2. Improvement of overall company performance and capabilities.
• Benchmarking to look at the best practices from other organizations and attempt to apply them to your own.
• Lean Thinking - always striving to get more done with less
• Statistical Process Control
3. Organizational and personal learning.
• Encouragement of innovation and risk taking.
• Employee engagement and empowerment.
• Leadership for performance excellence.
• A team based or process based organizational structure
• Fact based management

Question 2

Managers can enforce rules about what people do and say at work. But can they enforce a culture If yes, how can they do it If no, what does this say about the limits of managers' ability to ensure quality

Answer 2

Culture is the set of shared values as opposed to hard and fast rules. Managers can encourage a certain culture within their organization, and they can certainly hire people that they believe will fit into the culture or promote the culture as they wish it to be. However, actually enforcing a culture may be contrary to the culture itself if the culture that is being promoted is one of trust, innovation, creativity and risk-taking.
The promotion of culture is very similar to the promotion of quality and quality would be an element of the culture should management choose to promote it. This says that management really cannot "enforce" quality. But, the idea of enforcing quality is contrary to the idea of quality itself. Quality should be encouraged and motivated. An environment should be created where quality is desired by the employee and it should not need to be enforced.

Question 3

A major stumbling block in implementing TQ in the United States has been the traditional adversarial relationship between unions and management. What should be the role of both unions and management in building a TQ culture

Answer 3

Unions need to be treated as a stakeholder or perhaps as a supplier in the quality relationship with management. By the same token, unions need to recognize the importance of quality to the future success of American business and the unions need to work toward establishing a relationship of cooperation and trust in order to assure their own ongoing existence and the success of their members. Both sides need to work to break down the adversarial relationship in order to build an environment conducive to performance excellence in union represented businesses.

Question 4

Compare the quality life cycle with the Baldrige model in Figure 11.1. How are they similar How do they differ

Question 5

What might the "learning organization" concept mean to a college or university

Question 6

How might internal benchmarking be applied with your college What types of activities would be appropriate

Question 7

The Parable of the Green Lawn
A new housing development has lots of packed earth and weeds but no grass. Two neighbors make a wager on who will be the first to have a lush lawn. Mr. Fast N. Furious knows that a lawn will not grow without grass seed, so he immediately buys the most expensive seed he can find because everyone knows that quality improves with price. Besides, he'll recover the cost of the seed through his wager. Next, he stands knee deep in his weeds and tosses the seed around his yard. Confident that he has a head start on his neighbor, who is not making much visible progress, he begins his next project.
Ms. Slo N. Steady, having grown up in the country, proceeds to clear the lot, till the soil, and even alter the slope of the terrain to provide better drainage. She checks the soil's pH, applies weed killer and fertilizer, and then distributes the grass seed evenly with a spreader. She applies a mulch cover and waters the lawn appropriately. She finishes several days after her neighbor, who asks if she would like to concede defeat. After all, he does have some blades of grass poking up already.
Mr. Furious is encouraged by the few clumps of grass that sprout. While these small, green islands are better developed than Ms. Steady's fledgling lawn, they are surrounded by bare spots and weeds. If he maintains these footholds, he reasons, they should spread to the rest of the yard. He notices that his neighbor's lawn is more uniform and is really starting to grow. He attributes this to the Steady children, who water the lawn each evening. Not wanting to appear to be imitating his neighbor, Mr. Furious instructs his children to water his lawn at noon.
The noon watering proves to be detrimental, so he decides to fertilize the remaining patches of grass. Since he wants to make up for the losses the noon watering caused, he applies the fertilizer at twice the recommended application rate. Most of the patches of grass that escape being burned by the fertilizer, however, are eventually choked out by the weeds.
After winning the wager with Mr. Furious, Ms. Steady lounges on the deck enjoying her new grill, which she paid for with the money from the wager. Her lawn requires minimal maintenance, so she is free to attend to the landscaping. The combination of the lawn and landscaping also results in an award from a neighborhood committee that determines that her lawn is a true showplace.
Mr. Furious still labors on his lawn. He blames the poor performance on his children's inability to properly water the lawn, nonconforming grass seed, insufficient sunlight, and poor soil. He claims that his neighbor has an unfair advantage and her success is based on conditions unique to her plot of land. He views the loss as grossly unfair; after all, he spends more time and money on his lawn than Ms. Steady does.
He continues to complain about how expensive the seed is and how much time he spends moving the sprinkler around to the few remaining clumps of grass that continue to grow. But Mr. Furious thinks that things will be better for him next year, because he plans to install an automatic sprinkler system and make a double-or-nothing wager with Ms. Steady. © 1994 American Society for Quality. Reprinted with permission.
Discussion Question
Within the context of the continual struggles to create a "world-class" lawn and "world-class" business, draw analogies between the events when TQ is implemented.

Question 8

The Parable of the Green Lawn
A new housing development has lots of packed earth and weeds but no grass. Two neighbors make a wager on who will be the first to have a lush lawn. Mr. Fast N. Furious knows that a lawn will not grow without grass seed, so he immediately buys the most expensive seed he can find because everyone knows that quality improves with price. Besides, he'll recover the cost of the seed through his wager. Next, he stands knee deep in his weeds and tosses the seed around his yard. Confident that he has a head start on his neighbor, who is not making much visible progress, he begins his next project.
Ms. Slo N. Steady, having grown up in the country, proceeds to clear the lot, till the soil, and even alter the slope of the terrain to provide better drainage. She checks the soil's pH, applies weed killer and fertilizer, and then distributes the grass seed evenly with a spreader. She applies a mulch cover and waters the lawn appropriately. She finishes several days after her neighbor, who asks if she would like to concede defeat. After all, he does have some blades of grass poking up already.
Mr. Furious is encouraged by the few clumps of grass that sprout. While these small, green islands are better developed than Ms. Steady's fledgling lawn, they are surrounded by bare spots and weeds. If he maintains these footholds, he reasons, they should spread to the rest of the yard. He notices that his neighbor's lawn is more uniform and is really starting to grow. He attributes this to the Steady children, who water the lawn each evening. Not wanting to appear to be imitating his neighbor, Mr. Furious instructs his children to water his lawn at noon.
The noon watering proves to be detrimental, so he decides to fertilize the remaining patches of grass. Since he wants to make up for the losses the noon watering caused, he applies the fertilizer at twice the recommended application rate. Most of the patches of grass that escape being burned by the fertilizer, however, are eventually choked out by the weeds.
After winning the wager with Mr. Furious, Ms. Steady lounges on the deck enjoying her new grill, which she paid for with the money from the wager. Her lawn requires minimal maintenance, so she is free to attend to the landscaping. The combination of the lawn and landscaping also results in an award from a neighborhood committee that determines that her lawn is a true showplace.
Mr. Furious still labors on his lawn. He blames the poor performance on his children's inability to properly water the lawn, nonconforming grass seed, insufficient sunlight, and poor soil. He claims that his neighbor has an unfair advantage and her success is based on conditions unique to her plot of land. He views the loss as grossly unfair; after all, he spends more time and money on his lawn than Ms. Steady does.
He continues to complain about how expensive the seed is and how much time he spends moving the sprinkler around to the few remaining clumps of grass that continue to grow. But Mr. Furious thinks that things will be better for him next year, because he plans to install an automatic sprinkler system and make a double-or-nothing wager with Ms. Steady. © 1994 American Society for Quality. Reprinted with permission.
Discussion Question
Specifically, translate the problems described here in business language. What are the implementation barriers to achieving TQ

Question 9

Why was it important for Park Place Lexus in the Performance Excellence Profile to benchmark business practices outside of the automobile industry How difficult would it be for a typical "Big Three" automobile dealership to embrace and implement the types of practices used by Park Place Lexus

Question 10

Describe some personal experiences in which you traveled through the four stages of learning described in this chapter.

Question 11

Briefly describe the three kinds of organizational change practiced in TQ efforts.

Question 12

You probably have, unfortunately, heard the term dysfunctional family in news stories about our society. What might the term dysfunctional corporate culture mean

Question 13

Describe the culture of an organization you have worked in or are familiar with. What is valued in this culture Do you think this culture provides fertile ground for TQ Why or why not

Question 14

Will an organization's culture be the same throughout or will it vary from department to department Why

Question 15

How do the values stated in "The Eastman Way" promote a performance excellence culture

Question 16

Find and examine five websites for large corporations. What do these sites tell you about the company's culture