Just a thought on the Baldrige award. Its recipients surely include many
stellar companies well worth exmination. However, the history of the award
also manifests its own learning value in terms of what happens when a
metric takes over (and ossifies) and becomes divorced from continuing
learning and improvement with benefit of experience in the real world.
I say this based on my recollection that some winners seem to have so
tailored their behavior to winning the award, as opposed to genuinely
improving their operations, that they fell flat on their faces as soon as
that external goal was achieved. My memory may be similarly disserving me,
but I will do some archeology in search of citations in case they are
useful to anyone.
Regards - Debbie Roth
--Debbie Roth <dr@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>