There are seven categories in The Best of the Best. Each section includes specific examples from Baldrige winners.

1. Leadership Approaches

2. Strategic Planning Approaches

3. Customer and Market Focus

4. Information and Analysis Approaches

5. Human Resource Approaches

6. Process Management Approaches

7. Business Results.

Leadership Approaches is available for no fee here. The complete set, a 50 page document, is available for $75.00 from PDG.  

Leadership Approaches

• Most leaders borrow or invent their vision for their firms. In the 1980s, Xerox CEO, David Kearns, studied the four year transformation of Fuji Xerox into a Deming Award winning firm. By 1982 Kearns and his whole executive committee had defined and adopted a total quality transformation process for Xerox Corp which was performing very poorly at the time. (Their worst year was 1984 when return on assets sank close to zero.) Xerox leadership entitled their remake of Xerox, "Leadership Through Quality." This transformation was based on benchmarks of the best firms in the world and was launched in 1983. By 1988 Xerox leaders adopted Baldrige assessments to drive the development and deployment of world-class management. When they won the Baldrige Award in 1989 their total corporate return on assets had been improving by one point per year for five years, and the rate of improvement was accelerating. By the time Xerox won the award (five years after their competitive crisis) they were gaining market share back in all markets where the Japanese competition had eroded their earlier dominance.

• Merrill Lynch Credit Corporation defines its leaders as "Champions for change" and "Champions for all that must not change" referring to their principles and values. Their leadership system identifies 7 activities of leaders: Commitment and Focus, Organization and Planning, Education and Training, Measurement and Ranking, Communication and Sharing, Problem Management and Prevention, and Recognition and Rewards.

• The CEO of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel chain personally trains every employee of each new hotel. He tells them why they are important to the company. They have a mission to be "Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen." They serve by providing customers with a genuinely pleasing interface which ensures that Ritz guests enjoy genuine care and comfort during their stay. Top leaders of the company personally examine customer feedback and monitor the training systems that guarantee that guest will be delivered carefully selected, fully trained, and highly motivated service.

• AT&T Universal Card Services (a credit card company that AT&T started up) set up a completely new organization with executives drawn from over 17 high performing organizations including American Express, Citicorp, MasterCard International, and VISA among others. This talented group had to form a leadership team with a common set of values and culture. They began by identifying their AT&T customer focused mission and values. Then, to ensure that they welded the best of all of their previous cultures together, they appointed an observer in every executive meeting to note how well the discussions and decisions in the meeting upheld the values of the new firm. The observer provided feedback at the end of each session. Within 9 months executive behavior had become consistent with values as measured by responses to employee surveys.

• Texas Instruments Defense Systems Electronics Group (TI) identified five leadership imperatives for all their senior managers:
• Own the vision
• Teamwork
• Communicate, Communicate!
• Learning (Don’t shoot the messenger)
• Participatory (collaborative) style

By stressing these leadership imperatives TI changed its culture from an authoritarian defense contracting culture to one in which self directed work teams used their empowerment to produce dramatic quality and productivity gains. As a result of the culture change, measurements of TI management time use show that total management time spent in making and implementing decisions dropped by 40 percent from the old to the new style of leadership. However, by delegating implementation to empowered work teams, the amount of management time spent in actual decision making rose fivefold. The extra time available for decision making improved the quality of decisions.

• AT&T UCS’s chairman defined quality in the credit card business as product and service characteristics that were "Market Breaker’s and Market Makers." He and his leadership team were starting up an entirely new credit card operation in a field with 9,000 well established competitors. To penetrate this saturated market, they identified the 10 to 15 percent per year of customers who switched credit cards as their major opportunity. The leadership team decided to develop a service and pricing strategy so attractive to these customers that they would select and prefer UCS. Long term loyalty to a credit card is the key to profitability in this business. The leaders personally committed to base their new product design on factors which the market would recognize as benefiting customers more than competitive offerings. Within 2 years of operation, 42% of consumers surveyed rated the UCS as the firm that was changing the market in ways that benefit customers. The nearest major competitor was cited as the market leader by only 12 percent of those surveyed. Within 2 years of start up the firm was the number two credit card issuer in the market and 3,000 banks had withdrawn from the market because of five reductions which AT&T UCS had made in the Annual Percentage Rate charged on customer balances.

• Solectron’s CEO formed a vision of Solectron as the best electronics design and manufacturing service firm in the world. The CEO and his leadership team have defined basic values (called Solectron beliefs) for guiding employee behavior. Solectron’s CEO consistently reinforces the norm that if behaviors do not reflect the beliefs, the behaviors must change – not the beliefs. The values are:

•Customer First 
• Respect for the individual 
• Quality
• Develop supplier partnerships
• Shareholder Value 
• Social Responsibility

• Boeing Airlift and Tanker Programs builds the C-17 aircraft, "the world’s best moving van," one of the nation’s most potent tools for shaping international developments. Because of technological challenges, the program experienced technical problems, late deliveries and cost over-runs. By 1991 the Air Force said it would buy only 40 aircraft and no more from Boeing unless there was drastic improvement. Management realized that they had to change processes and products to get better results. Up to that time, schedule had been king in manufacturing processes. When the schedule said "move the airplane," Boeing moved it, ready or not. By 1994, after two and one half years of poor delivery performance, the Division manager abruptly changed priorities to 1. Quality, 2. Schedule, and 3. Cost and forbid manufacturing to move each airplane in progress until it was ready. This broke all traditions at Boeing and meant that all parts had to in the plane, in the right order, before it moved. This eliminated removal, rework, reinstallation, and repair that actually required Boeing to rebuild each new airplane two times before delivery. From that point on, Boeing never missed another delivery.

• Solectron trains its senior leaders in the Baldrige framework. Working on teams, the senior managers of the company examine and assess all operating units as part of Solectron’s Total Quality Excellence Award (STQEA). This award process was benchmarked from AT&T which has a similar approach to using senior executives and corporate leaders in assessing business units against the Baldrige criteria.

• Federal Express executives assume personal responsibility for improvement in a defined area of the firm’s performance each year. This responsibility requires that they spend a significant amount of time personally learning about the factors bottlenecking performance in their area of responsibility. From Chairman, Fred Smith, on down, executives meet with employees on the job and learn first hand what factors are helping or impeding operational productivity. FedEx expects its leaders to champion changes which will improve operations as well as maintain a focus on employee well-being and safety.
  
• Corning Glass Works Chairman Jamie Houghton found that some of his executive colleagues resisted adoption of the Baldrige framework as a model for high performance. He challenged these executives to present an alternative model of a high performing business organization. The executives were asked to adopt either an alternative to the Baldrige framework or the Baldrige model. He mandated that executives managing without a clear model of how the firm was to generate outstanding results were not qualified to lead the firm in the fast changing optical fiber industry.

• Solectron’s leadership clearly defines the firm’s mission to provide world-wide responsiveness to customers by offering the highest quality, lowest total cost, customized integrated design, supply chain management, and manufacturing services through long term partnerships based on integrity and ethical business practices. The leadership team communicate the mission and vision through constant reviews:

• CEO reviews performance vs. plan monthly

• CEO visits each site quarterly where managers present to him personally

• General mangers review customer executive survey annually

• Site managers meet all employees quarterly to review results, key customer developments, and status of strategic initiatives.

• Virtually all high performing firms involve their leaders in reviewing organization structures and reward and recognition to ensure that these factors continually reinforce high performance. Firms such as Solectron establish a development plan which covers the roles and responsibilities for high performance in each leadership position. Reward and recognition approaches reinforce the desired behaviors consistent with each position. Firms such as Xerox, GTE Directories, AT&T Consumer Communications Services among others place significant stress on leading non-financial indicators of future success (such as customer and employee satisfaction) as they do on lagging indicators such as financial results and market share gains and losses when reviewing management performance.

• Merrill Lynch Credit Corporation uses a "roll down" review system starting at the top with its 14 mission-level metrics. Each month, the reviews begin at the top and roll down through all levels of the organization. At each level, managers relate their in-process (leading indicators) and end of process (lagging indicators) results to the critical few objectives (CFOs) from the annual plan. They set improvement priorities based on these objectives. At each level, managers analyze gaps between actual and plan and investigate the root causes for being over or under targets. By coaching lower level managers in developing countermeasures for slippage on leading indicators of results, leadership reviews keeps the firm on plan.

• Leadership systems use promotions to signal leadership behaviors that the firm encourages. Xerox’s David Kearns used the firm’s succession planning system to identify his firm’s leaders in every area and to promote a sweeping corporate transformation known as the "Leadership Through Quality" program. Kearns set a list of 8 behavioral standards for Xerox leaders, called "role model managers." These standards covered: promoting Xerox’s overall Leadership Through Quality strategy; personal use of and coaching of others to use quality and process improvement tools and methods; relating all business decisions to customer satisfaction as a key measure; encouraging feedback from peers and responding to feedback by changes in behavior; establishing plans and meeting them; hiring and promoting people who uphold the Xerox Leadership Through Quality principles; rewarding and recognizing those who support the program and counseling those who need coaching and guidance. Kearns then surveyed employees on whether they regarded each Xerox manager as a role model on the behavioral standards. Those managers not considered role models by peers and subordinates (rated as "adequate" or "needs improvement") in any critical leadership behavior were classified as not promotable to higher positions until they modified their behavior to "role model" in all areas of leadership behavior.

• 3M Dental Products leadership team defined a "success culture." This culture was:
• Vision driven
• Customer focused
• Global attitude
• Leadership immersion
• Process saturation
• Employee inclusive – every employee must be included
• Continuous improvement – every process every day. At the time of their Baldrige Award 3M Dental was running the 42^nd revision of their new product development process under this success culture.

• In the early 90’s Dale Crownover, owner of Texas Nameplate, a 66 employee firm, realized that it was not going anywhere. If TNC lost customers it went out and replaced them, if it lost employees, someone hired replacements. The President formed a BELT – the Business Excellence Leadership Team – to apply the Baldrige system to the business. These 7 key people clarified the goals and vision – to be the best nameplate company in the US by turning delighted customers into its best marketing tool. Beneath this came the DOIT – Daily Operation Innovation Team, supervisors who meet twice a month and run the business using a system of measurements. Finally, the rest of the firm’s employees serve on corrective action, standing, recognition, ISO, and Baldrige and support service teams. Many of these teams formed in response to feedback from Texas Quality or Baldrige Award assessments. By focusing the organization on excellence, the firm doubled its sales while holding employment steady.