Top Management Story

Writen by LM Foong

In this issue, I will share my experience acquired from the conglomerate and its operating companies. For the purpose of this article, I will articulate the Focus on Results and Creating Value which is one of the Eleven Values and Concepts in Malcolm Baldrige Criteria (Source: http//www.nist.gov/quality). As before, I will use case studies to show how some of the companies implement them.

To recap, below are the Eleven Core Values and Concepts of Baldrige Criteria:-

Visionary Leadership | Customer-Driven Excellence | Organizational and Personal Learning | Valuing Employees and Partners | Agility | Focus on the Future | Managing for Innovation | Management by Fact | Public Responsibility and Citizenship | Focus on Results and Creating Value | Systems Perspective

I will deal with the one of the Value in bold letters in this article as below:-

Articulated Focus on Results and Creating Value

An organization's performance expectations need to focus on key business and operational results. These results should be used to create and balance value for your key stakeholders: -

1. Customers
2. employees
3. stockholders
4. suppliers and partners
5. the public and community

By creating value for your key stakeholders, your organization builds loyalty and contributes to growing the economy. To meet the sometimes conflicting and changing aims that balancing value implies organizational strategy should explicitly include key stakeholder requirements.

This will help ensure that plans and actions meet different stakeholders' needs and to avoid adverse impacts on any stakeholders. The use of a balanced of lead and lag indicators offers an effective means to communicate short- and longer-term priorities, monitoring of actual performance, and provide a clear basis for improving results.

Case Study on Focus on Results and Creating Value

It was a very strong focus on creating results in all the companies I worked with. Although there is some differing of stakeholders needs, it seldom put enough emphasis on other stakeholders except for the stockholders, customers, employees, partners and community. Incidentally the lists are ranked based on its priorities.

Stockholders needs are traditional very strong in the philosophy of these companies. It is not the case where leaders of these companies does not appreciate the needs of other stakeholder, it is a case where they cannot meet all these needs consistently hence the ranking of priorities. Unfortunately, the priorities became a norm after some times of non fulfillment.

Companies still very much chase after the finance number at best the market sakes numbers. Not many chase after productivity numbers hence the operations.

Opportunity for Improvement

Based on Dr. Kaplan's balanced Scorecard concept, the financial results are the consequence of the focus given to the customer, the operation excel into satisfying these customers, the competency of the human resource that perform these operations etc.

If this balanced scorecard concept is fully appreciated, leaders should realign the business into meeting the stakeholders need i.e. Financial aspect by way of gear up the human resource capabilities and process capabilities to satisfy the customers such that they remain with the companies. Consequently, financial result should be the expected outcome.

In summary, having understood the Focus on Results and Creating Value in Values and Concepts of Malcolm Baldrige, it should be taken as a strategic issue rather than operational. Most companies have in placed a Marketing Strategy, some would have Operational Strategy, would you want to consider having HR Strategy too? Leaders might benchmark their CEO of Baldrige Winners on their TQM successes in this value. My next article will articulate the next Core Values and Concepts in System Perspective

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Disclaimer: This article is written by the author based on his practical application experience. All definitions and interpretation of terminology are his point of view and has it has no intention to conflict with experts in similar topic. The author holds no responsibility for the use of this article in any way.

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Free to reprint or re-publish: All rights reserved. You are free to reprint or re-publish this article as long as you include my resource box at the end of this article. And ensure that the URL in the resource box remained intact and it is linked to the author's website.

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About the Author: LM Foong

The author is a trained Assessor in Baldrige style of assessment. He facilitates Baldrige style Assessment workshops and post assessment improvement. He publishes TQM articles, ebooks, case studies, trainer manual and presentation slides. Please visit my Web Site for Baldrige Criteria 2001 and other TQM related matters