Will you win?

Last October BBest launched the first Excellence Award program in the Benelux based on an evaluation with the EFQM Model. The Benelux Excellence Award is an official part of the EFQM Excellence Award program and as such the ideal ‘try out’ opportunity for organisations planning to go for the EFQM Excellence Award. The goal of the BEA-program is to identify organisations that have made considerable progress on their ‘Journey towards Excellence’ and recognise these organisations with an award, the Benelux Excellence Award.

Any company, organisation or operational unit in Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg can enter into the BEA-program regardless of their size and sector of activities (public, private or not-for-profit). Applicants will be requested to prepare a submission document as preparation for the assessment team. The actual performance of the applicant will be evaluated through a ‘Recognised for Excellence’ type of assessment with the EFQM Model. A small team of experts will execute this assessment. All applicants will receive an assessment feedback report detailing their strengths and areas for improvement. Also a score on the achieved level of Excellence at that time will be provided. However to have a ‘fighting chance’ to actually win the award please be aware of the fact that is it expected that applicants have a mature quality management system in place already for some time. The management system should either based on ISO or a sector specific quality system derived from the EFQM Model, or obviously directly based on the EFQM Model itself.

Candidate organisations for the Benelux Excellence Award 2011 can contact BBest directly to enrol into the program and need to keep in mind that they should also be able to have the EFQM-assessment done ultimately by September this year.

An award will be presented to the company or organisation that has been rated to be the best in his category:

Not-for-profit – small organisations

Not-for-profit – big organisations

Profit – small organisations

Profit – big organisations

In October 2011 during the next annual BBest conference the awards will be presented. Will we be handing this beautiful award to you maybe? Hope so!

Don’t miss my article in magazine Kwaliteit in Bedrijf, a renowned Dutch quality magazine. The magazine will publish my Business Excellence Award article in their March issue.

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!