Quality Awards Help Strategy Implementation

In my role as a strategic quality consultant I have audited management systems using Sarbanes-Oxley, ISO 9001, and Malcom Baldrige criteria. Of the three, the Malcolm Baldrige criteria training and process provides the best learning experience for strategy implementation.  Now don’t get me wrong, Sarbanes-Oxley and ISO 9001 are both useful in their own right, but they both focus on details that are often times interpreted as requiring a lot of paper-based solutions and bureaucracy (of course they don’t really “require” a bureaucracy but that is how many people interpret the solution) consisting of procedures, records, or documents.

Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award

Malcolm Baldrige, on the other hand, does not imply or require that you have to have any specific procedures, records, or documents.  But it does focus on the applicant’s management system maturity.  Companies must demonstrate their process approaches, systemic deployment, cycles of learning, and how their systems are integrated together to drive the organization through the implementation of an effective strategic vision and mission.

This is my third year as a quality award examiner, and each year I learn more about strategy implementation.  Each year an examiner must apply the Malcolm Baldrige criteria to a case study and a real application.  Each year you get a chance to discuss your comments with other examiners in order to reach a consensus opinion.  And each year you get the opportunity to go on-site to an applicant’s facilities and spend time with senior management, supervisors, and employees.  These interviews allow you  to see firsthand an applicant’s strategy deployment in order to determine their strengths and derive opportunities for improvement that will allow the applicant to move on to the next level of management system maturity.

Winners of quality awards are not perfect.  But they do display some exemplary processes and performance that other organizations can learn from and model.  If you find strategy implementation to be difficult or perhaps you are unclear on how it all goes together, then I would recommend you take the time to become a quality award examiner to see how others are solving their strategy implementation problems.

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Originally published in 2009 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title Quality Awards Help Strategy Implementation. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com