Our dreams of excellence - learning from the past and architecturing the future
Our dreams of excellence – learning from the past and architecturing the future
The next to last paper in this special issue, “Excellence – 25 years evolution” by Dahlgaard-Park and Dahlgaard (2007), concludes with the following text about excellence found on an embroidery at a public market in Seattle:
ExcellenceCan be attained if you ...Care moreThan others think is wise.Risk MoreThan others think is safe.Dream moreThan others think is practical.Expect moreThan others think is possible.
The aim of this editorial is to elaborate and discuss the text further, using it as a framework to introduce the articles contained in this special issue.
What may have been in the mind of the author of this sublime text? Well we do not know exactly but here follows a series of “dreams” related to the same text and of course, related to our background and experiences. Our dreams may have a lot of overlap to what were the unknown author's dreams but we may never find out. However, we hope that our dreams maybe will overlap with the readers' dreams and also will contribute to further inspiration and to helping the readers in building new dreams for creating excellence in the contexts in which they are living and working wherever it may be. For these aims we will analyze in the following the embroidery text above sentence for sentence.
Excellence can be attained if you ...
Know what excellence is. If you do not know what excellence is then I think it is difficult to know if or when you have attained it. So we have to start with a discussion about what is excellence.
People have tried to define excellence during the long history of mankind so it is natural and honest to declare that we do not know when excellence was first defined and we also do not know what the contents of this first definition were. But what we know with certainty is that the concept of excellence in relation to management and organizational performance was popularized 25 years ago by Peters and Waterman (1982) when they published their famous book In Search of Excellence – Lessons from America's Best-run Companies.
The starting analysis model or framework used by Peters and Waterman (1982)was McKinsey's 7-S framework. The framework comprised the following success criteria for excellence:
- 1.
Hardware:
structure; and
strategy.
- 2.
Software:
systems
shared values;
skills;
staff; and
style.
Peters and Waterman (1982) did not define “excellence”. Rather,they observed that managers get more done if they pay attention to the seven Ss instead of just two (the hardware criteria), and real change in large institutions is a function of how management understands and handles the complexities of the 7-S model. Peters and Waterman (1982) also reminded the world of professional managers that soft is hard – the soft criteria of the model are so often overlooked when they should have the highest focus on the journey to excellence.
Both before and after 1982 there have been many suggestions for a definition of excellence. According to the American Heritage Dictionary (1992),excellence is defined as “the state, quality, or condition of excelling;superiority.” Furthermore, the word excel is defined as “to do or be better than; surpass; to show superiority, surpass others. A Greek reference more than several millennia old can be found in the paper by Anninos (2007). According to this reference, excellence is inseparable with the idea of good,which can be defined by the unique properties of the object or activity it describes. It has meaning only by reference to the intrinsic qualities of a person, an object or activity, so there is no one “expression of good,”there is no one “good practice.” Good can be evaluated only in relation to the means it serves and the function it performs.
The old Greek word areté is used synonymously with excellence and in its earliest usage the concept contained meaning of the act of living up to one's full potential (Jaeger, 1945). Areté as the idea of perfection and excellence was an important aspect of the Paideia, the process of educating and training of the boy into his genuine human nature in Ancient Greek (Jaeger, 1945). Later on, areté was applied to mean men who had developed inner virtues such as dikaiosyne (justice) and sophrosyne(self-restraint) which are represented in the training program of the Paideia. Thus, physical, mental and spiritual training were developed in order to achieve areté (Jaeger, 1945).
Similar ideas about excellence can be found in Confucius (BC 551-479)(Dahlgaard-Park, 1999). Achieving intrinsic quality in terms of practicing justice and character building has been one of the main themes in Lun Yu(Analects of Confucius). Self-control and self-development via lifelong training and education were not only considered the methods to realize one's full potential but also the way to achieve harmony in society in general. By that reason leaders role was especially emphasized by Confucius. His notion of Junji(Superior/Excellent man or leader) demonstrates this:
Junji (Superior/Excellent man or leader) makes peoples' merits to grow and demerits to decrease, while inferior man does the opposites (Analects, from Dahlgaard-Park, 1999, p. 47).
Within this standpoint, excellence includes doing common, everyday things and excellence is not necessarily determined by comparing a score or performance to someone else. The pursuit of excellence comes from doing our best with a view of growing and improving in terms of realizing one's potential. Excellence must then be related to the abilities that a man or group of men has. As parents we know that having had the experience of following our children from babies to grown ups. One of our children may have excellent abilities given by God, but for some reasons he or she do not use the abilities in a good way, and another child may have far lower abilities, for example, for studying, but he or she is nevertheless fighting and struggling day after day and the final graduation result may be almost the same. In such a case there is no doubt in our minds who of the two children and which result we will relate to excellence. However, in relation to management and organizational excellence the situation may be not so easy to evaluate. The problem or challenge here is to relate performance results to the abilities of the organization.
When the word excellence is used in quality management it refers to upgrading the level of organizational management to a level of excellence, which is necessary to provide excellent results, i.e. products and services which delight the customers/consumers.
Zink (2007) analyses the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM)excellence model or European Excellence Model (EEM). Introduced by the EFQM at the beginning of 1992 as the framework for assessing organizations for the European Quality Award, the EEM is now the most widely used organizational framework in Europe and it has become the basis for the majority of national and regional Quality Awards. Zink (2007) concludes that the EEM and other similar excellence models are valuable instruments to transfer the concept of corporate sustainability into practice. This is done by combining environmental and social aspects with the traditional set of business objectives. Excellence means here to balance goals between economic, environmental and social issues, combining long-term economic success with conserving the biophysical environment and social responsible actions. Goal conflicts need to be changed into goal congruence to create a win-win situation between the dimensions of sustainability. Excellent performance of a corporation is not only determined by financial results but also by the company's environmental and social performance. This is the dream of corporate sustainability.
Another issue which also may be highlighted when discussing the scoring criteria of the different excellence models is if these criteria have been revised in accordance to the recent focus and importance of corporate sustainability. Here, it seems that we have a dilemma regarding which voice is the strongest – the society's voice or the business owners' voice. As the scoring mechanisms are designed, companies will get higher excellence scores when they document excellent financial results compared to companies which focus more on attaining excellent society results. It seems that it is the right time now to revise the rules of the excellence show. Our dream about corporate sustainability seems to be utopia if the award giving organizations continue to ignore the society's new needs.
The paper by Dahlgaard-Park and Dahlgaard (2007), inter alia, presents a model – the “4P” excellence model – which is a simplified version of the EEM which promotes an integrated approach between various, and often conflicting aspects, such as soft (intangible) and hard(tangible) aspects, subjective and objective aspects, rational and irrational aspects, individual/personal and collective/organizational aspects. Such conflicts are not recognized in the world of economic rationalism. Gates and Steane (2007) trace the development of economic theory up till the point where the term “economic rationalism” became a household name and excellence becomes measured in utility maximization.
Care more than others think is wise
Here, we do not hesitate to relate this pre-condition for excellence to the people dimension of management and leadership. Many experts – academics as well as top managers/leaders – have said that the first condition for achieving excellence is to have excellent people. This is the background for the“4P” model mentioned above. Excellent people will create excellent partnerships which will create excellent processes and products – which together define the characteristics of excellent organizations.
In the paper by Dahlgaard-Park and Dahlgaard (2007), the importance of care has been dealt with in discussing Peters and Austin's (1985) subsequent excellence model. Peters and Austin (1985) regarded excellence as being the result of the following four critical success factors:
- 1.
people, who practice;
- 2.
care of customers;
- 3.
constant innovation; and
- 4.
leadership which binds together the first three factors by using management by wandering around at all levels of the organization.
This excellence model indicates that care is not an end in itself but rather a means to the end which is constant customer focused innovation. This is only possible if care also is related to the organization's people. Another name for people care is respect for people which, together with continuous improvements,is regarded by Toyota to be the secret or the DNA of Toyota Production System(Dahlgaard-Park and Dahlgaard, 2007).
Risk more than others think is safe
Most people may first think about external situations when they see this sentence but we think that to risk more than others think is safe can also be related to internal situations. External situations will often be related to innovation/new product and service development or to situations where you have to decide if it is risky to enter a new market. We agree that this is definitely of importance for attaining excellence. Internal situations related to excellence are concerned with improvement or change in people's attitudes,knowledge, skills and culture. These areas need to be changed before real breakthrough in the results which you deeply wish may happen (Juran, 1964).
Change in people's attitudes, knowledge, skills and culture takes time– often several years – and massive education and training programs are needed, which costs time and money. Many people may think that this is a risky business and often management will hesitate to invest the needed resources in such a project (or process). Management may think that this is an unsafe investment.
All papers in this special edition give contributions for understanding why investing in people is important for attaining excellence.
Dream more than others think is practical
Understanding the power of dreams may also be important for developing new attractive products and services. In his paper “Organizing dreams:exploring futuristic manufacturing perspectives” Foo (2007) goes deeper into the meaning of dreams and suggests that deep dimensions of competition– and roots for future excellence – may lie in meeting products that are dreams of customers. To properly do this, managers of corporations in the future will have to learn to grasp the minds of customers. What are critical is enabling meaningful, dream product interactions. That is in having technology in place for customers to communicate to organizations not their product choice per se but their dream product. That a customer is able via technology,show-case to the organization what is in their dreams. In other words, let the prototype of the next product emerge through technology enabled interactions with customers.
Expect more than others think is possible
An expectation is another word for a human hope. Without hope there is no expectation.
Matsushita (1989), the founder of the world's largest consumer electronics company, teaches us what it means to expect and reminds us that trust and expectations are two sides of the same coin:
Yet, I can't resist the temptation to say that I was well aware of the crucial importance of human relations in corporate setting even in the early days of my business career. Granted, my approach is intuitive, and my knowledge is experiential. But my instinct, and perhaps my conscience, dictated to me that I should trust my employees if I expected them to trust me. I must have full confidence in their ability to learn and their potential for personal growth. Only then would the employees have full faith in my managerial competence and personal integrity.
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This wise text may be an important eye-opener for managers who for some reason think that their employees' abilities and motivation are too low for attaining excellence.
In their paper, “A review of historical developments of quality assessment in industry and healthcare” Komashie et al. (2007),authors conclude that expectations for better healthcare have changed during the last decades from expectations and changes initiated by professionals who could not endure low-healthcare quality which led to people's sufferings and death. A famous example for that is constituted by the initiatives and changes led by the nurse Florence Nightingale during the Crimean war.
By using references from their literature review the authors find what is needed to satisfy the high expectations for improvements in quality of healthcare are a localization of quality that encourages a feeling of ownership and greater likelihood of pride in personal and group achievement akin to the internalized values of the medieval craft groups. Without such internalization,a climate of quality cannot be said to exist. The most accurate diagnosis of a health care problem and the most valid assessment of the factors contributing to it will not produce the desired improvement unless effective techniques for changing individual and organizational behaviors can be applied when necessary.
To solve the problem of changing individual and organizational behaviors,Komashie et al. (2007) suggest a new approach, which uses a real-time computer model of the healthcare environment that displays a healthcare quality index and other key performance factors. The benefits of this are that healthcare managers and staff on the ground can access a user-friendly approach to understanding current activity (e.g. hospital throughput, waiting times) by viewing simulation models. Changes can be made to the “current”model (i.e. current picture of what is happening) in order to test for different outcomes and assess which would represent the best quality (e.g. reduced length of stay). This would represent one of the most sophisticated advancements in healthcare quality as it would allow clinicians to be directly involved in decision-making on an ongoing basis, thereby improving the feeling of “ownership”and enhanced efficiency at the organizational level.
So there it is – we hope that these dreams of excellence enable readers to learn from the past and can be used as building blocks for the future.
Su Mi Dahlgaard-ParkGuest Editor
ReferencesAmerican Heritage Dictionary (1992), Delta, New York, NY.Anninos, L.N. (2007), “The archetype of excellence in universities and TQM”, Journal of Management History, Vol. 13 No. 4.Dahlgaard-Park, S.M. (1999), From Ancient Philosophies to TQM and Modern Management Theories, Linköping University Press, Linköping.Dahlgaard-Park, S.M. and Dahlgaard, J.J. (2007), “Excellence – 25 years evolution”, Journal of Management History, Vol. 13 No. 4.Foo, C.T. (2007), “OM of manufacturing: exploring futuristic manufacturing perspectives”, Journal of Management History, Vol. 13 No. 4.Gates, D.K. and Steane, P. (2007), “Historical origins and development of economic rationalism”, Journal of Management History, Vol. 13 No. 4.Jaeger, W. (1945), Paideia – the Ideals of Greek Culture,Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, (Gilbert Highet trans.), Archaic Greece The Mind of Athens.Juran, J.M. (1964), Managerial Breakthrough: A New Concept of the Manager's Job, New York, NY, McGraw-Hill.Komashie, A., Mousavi, A. and Gore, J. (2007), “Quality management in healthcare and industry: a comparative review and emerging themes”, Journal of Management History, Vol. 13 No. 4.Matsushita, K. (1989), As I See It, PHP Institute, Inc., Tokyo.Peters, T.J. and Austin, N.K.(1985), Passion for Excellence, Warner Books, New York, NY.Peters,T.J. and Waterman, R.H. (1982), In Search of Excellence – Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies, HarperCollins Publishers, London.Zink,K.J. (2007), “From total quality management to corporate sustainability based on a stakeholder management”, Journal of Management History,Vol. 13 No. 4.
Further readingDahlgaard-Park, S.M. and Dahlgaard, J.J. (2006),“In search of excellence – past, present and future”, in Schnauber, H. (Ed.), Kreativ und Konsequent, Carl Hanser Verlag, Berlin,pp. 57-84.
