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The BaldrigePlus Newsletter
Issue 4 Friday February 4th 2000 Encouraging email of the week You are doing a wonderful job on the web site, and I love the newsletter! I've just completed my sixth year as an Examiner/Senior Examiner with Baldrige and am helping some small businesses with our local Chamber of Commerce. I've been directing both them and my university students to it and plan to use it specifically for supplementary readings and assignments next year. Jim Evans, author of The Management and Control of Quality Link of the week MCB University Press, a major British publisher of academic journals, including a number that this newsletter's readers may find worth scanning, has just relaunched and renamed its web site, as 'Emerald Now.' Each month the new site will have a theme (this month it's The Challenge of Leadership) free articles, an interview with a leading academic or practitioner, an extended editorial, and access to 'Journals of the Week' with free online access to selected titles. Here's a sample of material and links from the January 2000 issue: EDITORIAL. With a background in Sociology, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor of business administration at Harvard, is a leading authority on business strategy, innovation, and the management of strategic and organizational change. Read the editorial (then go review your category 2, Leadership, files?). SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW. Actually, Rosabeth Moss Kanter's holds a chaired professorship as the Class of 1960 Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and advises major corporations and governments worldwide. Read the full Spotlight interview ARTICLES. Access the full text 1. Leadership in the twenty-first century, Mike Bagshaw, Caroline Bagshaw Industrial & Commercial Training; 31:6 1999; pp. 236-242 ; ISSN: 0954-478X 2. Organization redesign: the current state and projected trends, Ceasar Douglas, Management Decision; 37:8 1999; pp. 621-628 ; ISSN: 0025-1747 3. Retaining high-tech talent: NIIT case study, Jim Gionfriddo, Lalit Dhingra Compensation and Benefits Review; 31:5 1999; pp. 31-35 ; ISSN: 0886-3687 4. The work/family interface at Royal Bank Financial Group: successful solutions - a retrospective look at lessons learned, Norma Tombari, Nora Spinks, Women in Management Review; 14:5 1999; pp. 186-194 Emerald Now is the showcase guide to a collection over 100 journals. Go here for a free trial of any of the journals, or the entire database Sydney or Bust If this newsletter seems a little, well, breathless, it's because your editor is off to Sydney, Australia, tomorrow to Qualcon 2000, a conference organised by the Australian Organisation for Quality in conjunction with the 7th National and 4th International research conference on quality management . I'm presenting a paper (Performance Excellence in Early Childhood Education the award-winning Auckland Hospital Staff Preschool), and sitting through three days of presentations on a wide variety of 'quality' topics. Presentations that have caught my eye (and that I'll be reporting on in future editions of the Newsletter) include: · Management in the 21st Century management by standards · Quality management the road to promoting the nation (China) · Impact of supply chain management on health · Quality in French universities a case study · Improving quality in the public service the Israeli experience · Improving China's healthcare system using data-mining techniques · Six Sigma, a quality philosophy for the next millennium · W(h)ither quality · Data collection and the economics of quality: identifying problems · Measuring local government services a critical analysis. That's about 5% of what's on offer over the three days! Five minute Master Class the power of Positive deviants No, we're not venturing into psychoanalysis. But we are still mining nuggets of information from the January-February Harvard Business Review. How can malnutrition in Vietnam provide lessons for change managers in hard-nosed commercial environments? Listen up. In an article titled The power of positive deviancy, Save the Children field director Jerry Sternin and consultant Robert Choo explain how nonprofits can provide lessons for the business world, not least because they frequently have to carry out wide-scale change management efforts under the toughest possible conditions with the highest possible stakes. Reducing child malnutrition in rural villages in Vietnam has been a decade-long effort by Save the Children, with a profound impact on the lives of about two million people. Searching for solutions from within the affected communities, Save the Children first found families who were somehow managing to raise healthy children the village's 'positive deviants.' Turned out those mothers were gathering freely available and plentiful food traditionally considered inappropriate for young children sweet potato greens, and shrimp and crabs from paddy fields and feeding their families several times a day, rather than the usual twice. The whole village trialled this approach, then other villages, then 20 Vietnamese provinces, and within two years 80% of participating children were no-longer malnourished. The foods were not always the same, but the process was. Find the healthy families the positive deviants copy their behaviour across the whole village. Lessons for your performance excellence efforts? · Look within your organisation for 'benchmark' standards and home-grown best practice for your positive deviants they're likely to be 'free,' culturally appropriate, and easier to transplant into nearby work units or workplaces · Because a positive deviance approach is home-grown, it'll be quicker to implement, and sustainable · The approach can be broadly applied, right across your enterprise, right down the supply chain and from management team to production line positive deviants are everywhere How do you do this in your organisation? Find the people who are already doing what you'd like to implement and find out how they're doing it what's different about their behaviour and transplant that behaviour throughout. Save the Children has since used this approach to deal with malnutrition in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Egypt, Mali, Mozambique and Nepal. |