What is the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award?

The Baldrige Award is given by the President of the United States to businesses – manufacturing and service, small and large – and to education and health care organizations that apply and are judged to be outstanding in seven areas: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; human resource focus; process management; and results.

Congress established the award program in 1987 to recognize U.S. organizations for their achievements in quality and performance and to raise awareness about the importance of quality and performance excellence as a competitive edge. The award is not given for specific products or services. Three awards may be given annually in each of these categories: manufacturing, service, small business, education, and health care. In October 2004, President Bush signed into law legislation that authorizes NIST (the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology) to expand the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Program to include non-profit and government organizations.

Why was the award established?

In the early and mid-1980s, many industry and government leaders saw that a renewed emphasis on quality was no longer an option for American companies but a necessity for doing business in an ever expanding, and more demanding, competitive world market. But many American businesses either did not believe quality mattered for them or did not no where to begin. The Baldrige Award was envisioned as a standard of excellence that would help U.S. organizations achieve world-class quality.

How is the Baldrige Award achieving its goals?

The criteria for the Baldrige Award have played a major role in achieving the goals established by Congress. They now are accepted widely, not only in the United States but also around the world, as the standard for performance excellence. The criteria are designed to help organizations enhance their competitiveness by focusing on two goals: delivering ever improving value to customers and improving overall organizational performance.

The award program has proven to be a remarkably successful government and private-sector team effort. The annual government investment of about $5 million is leveraged by a contribution of over $100 million from private-sector and state and local organizations, including $10 million raised by private industry to help launch the program and the time and efforts of hundreds of largely private-sector volunteers.

The cooperative nature of this joint government/private-sector team is perhaps best captured by the award’s Board of Examiners. Each year, more than 300 experts from industry, educational institutions, governments at all levels, and non-profit organizations volunteer many hours reviewing applications for the award, conducting site visits, and providing each applicant with an extensive feedback report citing strengths an opportunities to improve. In addition, board members have given thousands of presentations on quality management, performance improvement, and the Baldrige Award.

What are the Baldrige criteria?

The Baldrige performance excellence criteria are a framework that any organization can use to improve overall performance. Seven categories makeup the award criteria.

Leadership – examines how senior executives guide the organization and how the organization addresses its responsibilities to the public and practices good citizenship.

Strategic planning – examines how the organization sets strategic directions and how it determines key action plans.

Customer and market forces – examineshow the organization determines requirements and expectations of customers and markets; builds relationships with customers; and acquires, satisfies, and retains customers.

Measurement, analysis, and knowledge management – examines the management, effective use, analysis, and improvement of data and information to support key organization processes and the organization’s performance management system.

Human resource focus – examines how the organization enables its workforce to develop its full potential and how the workforce is aligned with the organization’s objectives.

Process management – examines aspects of how key production/delivery and support processes are designed, managed, and improved.

Business results – examines the organization’s performance and improvement in its key business area: customer satisfaction, financial and market place performance, human resources, supplier and partner performance, operational performance, and government and social responsibility. The category also examines how the organization performs relative to competitors.

http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/baldfaqs.htm

 

Unit 10

Reengineering: What Happened?

By John A. Byrne

 

Not long ago, a book was published that helped define one of the most influential management concepts to emerge in years. Reengineering the Corporation, by James Champy and Michael Hammer, sold nearly 2 million copies in 14 languages, making it the best-selling book since In Search of Excellence.

Reengineering inspired executives and managers in thousands of companies to start rethinking and redesigning such basic business practices as customer service, order fulfillment, and product development. And for some, reengineering brought quantum improvements in productivity, customer satisfaction, and quality while significantly cutting costs. Champy, chairman of CSC Index’ Consulting Group in Cambridge, Mass., and Hammer are world-renowned management gurus.

What can an author possibly do for an encore? Champy, flying solo here – Hammer will bring out two reengineering books later this year – opens with a startling admission: “Reengineering is in trouble.” Despite notable success at such companies as Bell Atlantic Corp. and Federal Express Corp., many reengineering efforts have fallen far short, Champy concedes. He cites one study in which companies failed to attain goals of cost reduction and market-share growth by as much as 30%. “The revolution we started has gone, at best, only halfway,” he writes. “I have also learned that half a revolution is not better than none. It may, in fact, be worse.” While countless managers have been persuaded to reengineer, too many have had poor or disastrous results.

So Champy examines the reasons the reengineering fails – and concludes that the key problem is management itself. Operational work can’t be reengineered without changing the way managers do their jobs. So, this book is less about the reengineering than about leadership, teamwork, empowerment and corporate culture.

What does Champy have to add on such overworked topics? Mainly some valuable context. Radical change is impossible unless managers know how to, in his words, “organize, inspire, deploy, enable, measure, and reward the value-adding operational work.” The lack of theses skills has been a stumbling block to nearly every reengineering initiative.

Through extensive interviews with managers who have lived through generally successful efforts at such companies as Wisconsin Energy, Intel, and Frito-Lay, Champy tries to show readers how to clear the hurdles. Survivors of other reengineering efforts are bound to empathize with one manager who tells Champy: “We don’t really know how to do reengineering in our company; so what we do is, we regularly downsize the company and leave it to the three people who are left to figure out how to do their work differently.”

Like so many sequels, however, Reengineering Management lacks the path-breaking content and passion of the original. Worse, readers have to slog through long transcribed passages of interviews that are often redundant or unrevealing. The oral-history approach just doesn’t work here – and roughly 75 pages are given over to the device.

That’s not to say Champy didn’t discover some exceptionally articulate managers with worthwhile things to say, among them Hewlett-Packard’s Jim Olson, Intel’s Kirby Dyess, and 3m’s Leon Royer. They make you realize reengineering can transcend what it too often becomes – a heartless exercise in downsizing.

Dyess, Intel’s vice-president for human resources, speaks eloquently of the need to redeploy valuable people whose jobs are wiped out by reengineering. Royer, 3M’s executive director of organizational learning

services, uses the metaphor of a hockey team to describe how new leaders must view their jobs. In a reengineered workplace, he says, leadership “switches back and forth depending on who has the puck. And where is the ostensible leader, the coach? Sitting on the sideline without skates. A coach can’t tell his skaters where to take that puck. He can train them, psych them, prepare them. But when the buzzer sounds, it the team that‘s out there on the ice…..”

Such comments help Champy provide insights into five vital “core processes of management.” They are: “mobilizing” the troops behind an initiative, “enabling” the workforce to accomplish the change, “defining” the objectives,” measuring” performance, and “communicating” to employees throughout. Champy urges some critical, if not entirely fresh, rethinking. He suggests, for example, that peer review of an employee’s performance is more valuable than the old-fashioned review by the boss. Similarly, he describes companies that communicate better with workers by sharing the results of customer-satisfaction surveys once seen only by management.

Champy alternates four chapters that make the case for changes in managing with four of comments from his managers. But that reveals an exasperating flaw. Although he has already defined his core processes, no one speaks to the first and perhaps most agonizing and divisive process – mobilizing employees to accept the changes reengineering entails.

Despite this missing piece, Reengineering Management stands as a helpful, if somewhat disappointing, companion to the first book. Managers awash in the ugly chaos of tearing apart their companies will find guidance and consolation here. But Champy’s encore could have used a bit of reengineering itself.

 

BusinessWeek

Vocabulary

1. product development разработка продукта

2. quantum improvement in productivity резкий рост производительности

3. to attain (meet) goals достичь цели

4. market-share growth рост доли на рынке

5. operational work операционная работа

6. leadership лидерство

7. teamwork работа в команде

8. empowerment 1) повышение роли, обретение

самостоятельной роли

2) наделение полномочиями

9. vice-president for human resources вице-президент по работе с

кадрами

10. to redeploy valuable people переводить ценных работников на

другую работу

11. to define the objectives определять цели

12. peer review of an employee’s performance оценка результатов деятельности

работника его коллегами

13. to make the case for smth (against smth) приводить доводы в пользу

(против)

 

 

Assignments

I. Suggest the Russian for the following:

1. to start rethinking
2. to redesign business practices
3. customer satisfaction
4. a world-renowned guru
5. many reengineering efforts have fallen far short
6. overworked topics
7. extensive interviews
8. to downsize the company
9. redundant and unrevealing passages
10. to define the objective
11. to measure the performance
12. agonizing and divisive process

 

II. Find the English for the following:

1. сокращение издержек
2. основная проблема
3. создавать возможности
4. оценивать
5. отсутствие умений
6. камень преткновения
7. преодолевать препятствия
8. расшифровка записи интервью
9. человек, чётко выражающий свои мысли
10. сократить рабочие места в результате реинжениринга

 

III. Answer the following questions:

1. What’s implied by reengineering?

2. What, according to Champy, are “the core processes of management”?

3. Do you agree with his statement that “peer review of an employee’s performance is more

valuable than the old-fashioned review by the boss”? Substantiate your point of view.

4. Why is mobilizing employees to accept the changes in a company thought to be most agonizing and divisive?

 

IV. Read the following text:

Reengineering Redux

by Eric Nee

With all the talk about how the Internet is transforming business and creating a New Economy, it's good to be reminded that some of these changes were set in motion before most people had ever heard of the Web.

That's what happened to me last week when I sat down with James Champy to discuss his latest book. The Arc of Ambition. I was reminded of the critical role Champy's 1993 best-seller, Reengineering the Corporation, played in setting the stage for today's transformations.

For those of you unfamiliar with Champy's book, it argued that most businesses were organized around business processes derived from the Industrial Revolution. And that with the dawning of what he then called the "Postindustrial Age," companies needed to rethink the way they did business, and reorganize their companies appropriately. In short - "Business Reengineering."

Many U.S. companies, in particular, took up the call. Reengineering programs were launched throughout the Fortune 500. In many cases, the programs were crude, resulting in layoffs and cost reductions, but little real change in the way work was done.

As it turned out, those early reengineering programs were simply a dress rehearsal. The real reengineering is taking place now as companies undergo drastic changes to adapt to the Internet.

Champy agreed. "Reengineering will come back big time in the next year or so," he predicts. "It's getting revived in all the B2B discussions." Champy, who is chairman of Perot Systems' consulting practice, is seeing this first-hand at many of the companies he works with.

Many industries are undergoing Internet-induced transformations in areas like sales, purchasing, supply-chain management, logistics, and manufacturing. And it's been made all the easier because of Champy's book. Having launched reengineering efforts once (which even Champy admits were not all they should have been), CEOs are not so reluctant to do it again.

Credit Champy with helping make U.S. companies more limber, less resistant to change, and better able to adapt to the Internet. Not to mention more profitable. (A big part of why we've had the longest economic boom in modern U.S. history.)

It's easy to think of the Fortune 500 as lumbering dinosaurs in the way they've reacted to the Internet. But in fact, they've adapted much better than they would have 10 or more years ago. And Champy deserves some of the credit.

I suggested to Champy that he revise his book and reissue it with a new title, something like "Reengineering the Corporation: For the Internet Age," He liked the idea. Don't be too surprised if you see something like it hit the bookstore in a year or so.

 

http://www.fortune/128,00