What is the most important Fundamental Concept of Excellence?

The LinkedIn-debate on this question I started a few weeks ago among the members of the EFQM Network for Sustainable Excellence has really taken off! However some more debate is needed…

As mentioned in my earlier blog the EFQM states no preference, but to get the discussion going I argued that Taking Responsibility for a Sustainable Future is the most important Fundamental Concept of Excellence.

A variety of views have been shared by the members in this discussion group and have included:

• Nice “academic question sparking debate”, however there is no most important Concept, but an organisation needs to take care of all Concepts to achieve sustainable results;
• Depending on the organisation’s goals, vision and strategic challenges at a specific point in time an organisation might need to give two or three Concepts more attention;
• That business survival is key and as a consequence Adding Value for Customers and Achieving Balanced Results are the most important Concepts;
• Things don’t move forward without leaders Leading with Vision, Inspiration and Integrity first;
• Organisations are made up of people, little happens without them, so Succeeding through People needs priority.

I was particularly struck by an interesting comparative question: “What is the most important room in the house?” For me it is the bathroom, but it was a difficult choice as I have a number of rooms to choose from. However there are many people in this world that don’t have a choice in this matter. 

With proposing the Concept Taking Responsibility for a Sustainable Future to be the most important I aimed to direct the discussion towards taking a more global perspective. To discuss maybe whether our current way of moving forward with an "inside-out focus" on the needs and expectations of the stakeholders will help us to address the global ecological and societal challenges lying on our doorstep? Would even an organisation striving for Sustainable Excellence take a wide enough view towards “all their stakeholders”? We perhaps need some debate on this topic?

A dress to light up your Christmas

The Danish design duo Diffus have designed and made a haute ‘tech’ couture dress that reacts to the CO2-level in the air by lighting up. It needs to charge for an hour or two first, but after that the sensor incorporated into the dress will be able to measure the level of CO2 in the air. The higher the CO2-level the faster the LEDs on the dress will light up!

This dress is known as the Climate Dress and was designed for the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009. The dress was not really meant to be useable; it was all about the concept. The dress is in essence an art object and as such it has been travelling around the world to be exhibited at fashion shows and museums. Currently it is on show at the Designhuis in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, until the end of January 2011. 

Furthermore it seems there is a Swiss company investigating the possibility of mass-producing this dress!? Don't you think that is funny too? You see, I was wondering whether the sensor would also react to the level of CO2 of somebody wearing the dress would exhale...

After sitting next to a socket for two hours to charge up, just imagine wearing the dress while having an intimate conversation with an admirer at your company's Christmas party... Soon the LEDs on your dress would be lighting up, attracting some laughing glances from your colleagues! But who cares? It is Christmas and YOU will have lit up the party! 
Have a Happy Christmas and an enlightened New Year everyone!!!!

Ecoliners

Now that I have opened myself up to seeing the constraints in the sustainability of our current way of life the most amazing and interesting items find their way to my attention.

This time it concerned an article about three guys that asked themselves why sea freight is not transported by sailing ships anymore these days. The obvious answer is of course because we invented the engine. But engines need fuel, fuel costs money and creates CO2! For sailing you need wind. Wind is free and CO2-neutral, so why shouldn’t we use ships with sails to transport our freight across the seas?

This sparked their idea for a competitive hybrid freight ship, the ecoliner. The research showed that using ecoliners has several advantages. It is estimated that by also using wind the use of fuel can be reduced with 50 to 90 percent. This creates not only enormous cost savings, but also a considerable reduction in CO2-emissions.

To be able to promote the idea of hybrid freight transport over sea they build a freight sail ship called the Tres Hombres. With this ship they have been successfully sailing freight across the oceans for a year and a half now.

As they fully expect that the ecoliner will be able to compete with regular freight transport over sea, even without subsidies, they are currently looking for investors in their project. Within three years they hope to have the first real ecoliner in operation. Personally I hope they are able to do that sooner!

Fundamental Concepts of Excellence

What do you think is the most important Fundamental Concept of Excellence?

As I reflect on it at lot, I regularly ask colleagues what they think is the core Concept of Excellence.

When I ask experts at the EFQM the answer is always the same … all Fundamental Concepts are all equally important! Hence the Concepts are not numbered. As you can see in the diagram EFQM do not highlight a preference.

However the written description of the Concepts starts with Achieving Balanced Results. But how would you react if another Concept is presented first…? For example if Adding Value for Customers or Succeeding through People was put on the top of the list?

I believe it might make a difference which Concept is presented first, as perhaps you might?

As you may have guessed from reading my previous blogs I think Taking Responsibility for a Sustainable Future is the most important Concept. It is clear to me that if we do not put this Concept on the top of our agenda very soon, we will have more challenges then we can handle as a planet. It bothers me that the description of this important Concept is listed last. 

Would you agree with me that Taking Responsibility for a Sustainable Future is the most important Concept? And would it make a difference to put this description first in the list of Concepts?

EFQM Ambassadors

As a member of the EFQM Faculty of Trainers I regularly have the pleasure to train a group of people who have applied to become EFQM Assessors. Again I had this pleasure last week, when I worked together with my fellow faculty member Chris Hakes.

Being an assessor is a demanding task and it requires a specific set of skills and competencies to be successful. That is why the EFQM Assessor Training (EAT) is a pass or fail training. Prior to the training participants are asked to analyse a case study. Completion of this case study exercise is a pre-requisite for taking the training. The ‘open registry’ trainings are delivered in Brussels at the EFQM premises. The training takes three days and people who pass are qualified to participate in an international EFQM Excellence Award Assessment. 

The assessor training is an intense event. During the open EAT you will normally work together with a diverse group of people who you have not met before, as you would during an assessment. The training group last week was again wonderfully diverse. People came from all over Europe and from various types of organisations to receive their training in Brussels.

During the training we go through the steps in the assessment process supported by the completion of several practical individual and team exercises. Participants are explained how to use the EFQM Model and RADAR in the context of executing an effective assessment of an organisation.

Ultimately Chris and myself have again been able to deliver new additions to the EFQM pool of assessors. The participants left the training content. Now they understand more about the EFQM Model and the benefits of applying it, not only for assessment purposes, but also as a tool for management for running and improving their business.

But apart from that I feel the EAT might also have turned them into new EFQM Ambassadors, as it turned me into one several years ago!

PBE

In 2006 when the deployment of the EFQM Excellence Model had been on the way for some time in Philips a new training course was developed. Although in-house assessor training had been provided to many managers throughout Philips over the years, the company identified that specifically RADAR-thinking provided the biggest added value to its managers in their day-to-day working environment. This resulted in the development of a training to teach managers in Philips to use this tool directly on processes. The training consisted of two courses. The first course was called the Philips Business Excellence Course 1 Introduction, a half a day introduction into Excellence, the Concept and the Model. The second course was the Philips Business Excellence Course 2 Calibration, a full day workshop to practice to apply RADAR directly on processes with help of a few case study assignments. The aim was to ‘quickly’ provide Philips managers with an easy and practical tool to help them to look at and review the processes in their own organisation in a structured way.

Specifically Philips Research has been providing these training courses to its managers for these many years. However as the EFQM Excellence Model was updated last year, so were the PBE-training materials in need of an update. On request of Philips Research I updated the training materials and provided the first ‘EFQM Model 2010 proof’ PBE-training courses to a group of managers from Philips Research at the beginning of this month. It was an inspiring and successful training as the participants concluded that RADAR is a practical tool to review their business processes and identify areas for improvement. One participant commented that he had wished he had known about this tool already years ago! I am very happy that the workshop was a success and I am already looking forward to providing the next PBE-training courses!

Chaordic

I attended two wonderful conferences. Towards the end of October I attended the annual conference of Bbest near Brussels with the sustainability of our future on the agenda. Earlier last month I was a delegate at the EFQM Forum on Creativity & Innovation The Art of Management. This year’s Forum was set in the beautiful Basque city of Bilbao home of the amazing Guggenheim Museum as the superb expression of creativity.

Throughout the Forum there was one question that occupied my mind at that time, and after still… A young Canadian speaker called Lotfi El-Ghandouri posed the question. He explained to us that you need chaos and not order to be able to be creative. He spoke about the concept of “chaordic”. And after some more explanations he asked us “How much chaos and how much order do you need to be creative?”

Later in the month I attended the Bbest Taking Responsibility for a Sustainable Future conference. You are maybe interested to learn that Bbest is the primary partner of the EFQM in Belgium and The Netherlands. It is licensed to promote and deliver the EFQM products and services in these countries. 

During the Bbest conference some exiting announcements were made. Firstly the translation in Dutch of EFQM 2010 Model has been completed and is now available. A group of Flemish and Dutch EFQM Model experts volunteered to create a new translation that would meet the needs of both Flemish and Dutch organisations interested in Excellence. Bbest also announced the Benelux Excellence Award. It will be presented for the first time in October 2011. It will be given to the organisation(s) with the best performance as assessed according to the EFQM Model. Organisations that have received a 4-star or 5-star Recognition for Excellence (R4E) from Bbest in the 12 months previous are automatically eligible for the Benelux Excellence Award.

The main part of the conference was obviously made up of companies sharing their strategies and approaches on sustainability. Although many good and relevant issues and options were discussed throughout the conference, I still had the unsettling feeling that despite these great examples we will not live in a sustainable future in anytime soon. We really need to be creative and implement global solutions to our sustainability challenges and quickly too.

Maybe we should be more brave and try it in a chaordic way?

Waste?!

For sometime I have been looking around me and been thinking: We cannot go on this way!? We are wasting away the world! We generally are not so nice getting all the resources we need to make the stuff, not so nice producing all the stuff, and are we really nice in finally (too quickly) getting rid of all the stuff we have consumed? If you have never seen the short video Story of Stuff on this topic I can recommend it to you.

Fortunately there are people that have already taken on the challenge to change this and have thought of actual solutions to turn around our destructive waste producing way of life. One of which is called Cradle to Cradle. The concept is based on re-thinking the way we do things, and this starts with the design of all the stuff we make. Products produced through the Cradle to Cradle concept are made from environmentally friendly pure materials that are good for human health and are designed in such a way that at the end of their useful lives, they can be biologically or technically recycled. This means no waste!

You might think now that that cannot be a profitable way of doing business? Let me assure you it can be! And I am very happy and proud that a reputable Dutch company has been able to do that. Desso is a manufacturer of carpet flooring in the Netherlands and Belgium already for many years (I know because my grandmother never wanted any other carpet …). The company has designed a Cradle to Cradle strategy for their whole business. Already they have successfully implemented this strategy for their biggest business unit, carpet tiles, and they plan to have the Cradle to Cradle strategy fully implemented by 2020.

In case you are interested to learn more about the Cradle to Cradle strategy of Desso: the CEO of the Desso Group, Mr. Stef Kranendijk, is speaking at the next annual Bbest conference titled Taking Responsibility for a Sustainable Future later this week. The title of Bbest’s conference this year is also the title of one of the eight Fundamental Concepts of Excellence. It is specifically for this Concept that I have high hopes to find many more excellent examples for the EFQM community to look at and learn from in the near future. I hope you find this contribution to my aim to promote this helpful. CU next time!

Just start!

It is time for me to start blogging. I have been thinking about how to start this blog for a long time now, considered several options and I have come to the conclusion it is best just to start with it! But before I do I need to clear up a few things.

First of all I will write in English and not, for instance, in Dutch, which is my mother tongue. The reason is that many of my friends and contacts speak other languages than Dutch and I want to communicate to “a big audience” so writing in English will be the best approach to take for my blog.

Secondly I expect mostly to write about excellence in a business context, meaning: to continuously improve the organisation to get better results.  Before long you will notice that I will refer to the EFQM and the EFQM Excellence Model often. For those among you that do not exactly know who or what this is can take a look at a good article in the online magazine of  Achieving Business Excellence October 2010.

Suspect that you will ask yourself “why” now. If you have read the article you know now, that the EFQM Model is not “new” as it has been around for 20 years. Personally I came in contact with the Model a little over 10 years ago, when I was still working for Philips. Since my first contact with the Model in Philips I have become more and more involved and interested in Business Excellence. Up to the point where I decided to put my long Corporate career in Finance at Philips to rest and put all my time and energy in helping organisations to improve.

Some insiders might refer to this state as “being bit by the Excellence bug”... Well, I know I have been bitten. I fully believe in the benefits of using the EFQM Model to improve your status quo and to get better and more balanced results, whatever results your organisation is aiming for.

However, the Model is not for wimps! One does need to put their teeth in it, as it will take some time, maybe years, to improve your results in a sustainable way. But this should not come as a surprise, good things hardly come easy! My advice is: just start! CU later!