The Prize

Successful Organizations

Organizations that have taken a systems approach to creating value for multiple stakeholders have demonstrated improved results across a comprehensive scorecard. Comprehensive means a scorecard that includes measures for all the stakeholders and the systems that produce value for them. A comprehensive scorecard contains measures of the value creation system, including customers, products, services, operations, workforce, suppliers, and partners. A comprehensive scorecard also tracks the impact on financial performance and relevant measures of society, local communities, and the natural environment. As the participants in our Baldrige CEO research study developed and implemented formal approaches to strategic leadership, they began to experience several benefits, including:

• improved alignment and integration of the organization’s managerial and leadership system components as well as strategy, actions, and results;
• improved communication and deployment of managerial approaches and systems;
• clarified roles, responsibilities, and boundaries;
• increased continuity and reduced dependency on individual leaders and employees throughout the organization;
• a systems perspective of the organization for leadership; and
• improved results. (Latham, 2013).

You can download examples of the results produced by role model organizations for free. The award application summaries for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipients are free on the NIST website. This collection of PDF documents includes organizations from a wide variety of industries, including large service, large manufacturing, small business, healthcare, education (both higher ed and K-12), and government and non-profit organizations. Each award application includes descriptions of how they manage the systems, and Category 7 at the end details some of their results across the comprehensive scorecard. Take advantage of this free online benchmarking opportunity and see how others have achieved sustainable excellence. The leadership and design approach is a more direct route to sustainable excellence than other options. This more direct route shortens the journey, increasing speed and benefits. Also, learning from those who have already succeeded increases your odds. Ultimately, the results you experience will depend on your particular design and how well it addresses the requirements of your key stakeholders.

Competitive Advantage

The only sustainable competitive advantage in a fast-changing world is to learn faster than everyone else. If you learn faster than your competitors, you will eventually catch up if you are behind, and once ahead, you will maintain your advantage.

Figure 1 Your Organization’s Performance is Improving Faster than the Comparison Organization

Sustainable excellence creates ever-increasing value for multiple stakeholders, including investors, customers, employees, suppliers and partners, the community, and the natural environment. It is achieved through the [re]design of an organization’s systems to create continuously improving high-performance results across a comprehensive scorecard that compares favorably to relevant comparisons while embedding those changes into the organization’s culture. Sustainable in this context means that the change endures and it does not take from one stakeholder at the expense of another. Only then will you have the organization you really want, and society needs.

Reference

Latham, J. R. (2013). A framework for leading the transformation to performance excellence part II: CEO perspectives on leadership behaviors, individual leader characteristics, and organizational culture. In Quality Management Journal (Vol. 20, Issue 3, p. 22). https://doi.org/10.1080/10686967.2013.11918354