My Conference Gem

I found my gem at the conference on the last day, at the last session. It was a Friday afternoon, after two days of conference and two days of pre-conference courses. Which means that by then the attendance at the sessions had thinned out considerably. And that’s too bad. I had given my second presentation at the next to last session on Friday, and had a pretty good crowd, but I know a lot of people were already heading to the airport. By the last session people were pretty sparse. I was a bit worn out after giving my two presentations and not having much sleep (which was odd, because I almost always sleep well), and wasn’t planning on going to any of the last sessions myself. None of the sessions looked interesting enough to draw me in, but I decided to go to one anyway. I picked one that was a little different for me, a session about a school district in Texas.

And that’s where I found my gem.

When I got to the room where the session was being held, there was only one other person there. Two more came in, but the first person left, so there were only three of us in attendance. A gentleman from the Aldine Independent School District in east Texas, around Houston, talked about how the performance of the schools in their district made a dramatic turnaround. It was truly fascinating and impressive. In 1993 the school district was in extremely poor shape in terms of performance, and they realized they were in severe crisis and had to do something. At that time they were introduced to the Baldrige Criteria, also known as the Criteria for Performance Excellence. They decided to use the criteria to improve their schools and their performance. And, boy, have they ever. From being at the bottom in 1993, to being an award winning district in 2004 through today, they have made incredible gains.

That in itself is impressive, but how they made the turnaround is a wonderful story. Given that over 80 % of the households in the district are “economically challenged” and near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, makes their results even more impressive. How did they make their improvement? By using the Baldrige Criteria and with a lot of hard work. The Baldrige Criteria itself is just a framework. It doesn’t tell you how to do anything, it just provides criteria that must be addressed if you want to achieve excellence. How you actually address those criteria is up to you. This school district did things like develop an effective communication system district-wide so that everyone knows what’s going on, implemented a peer review system that brought teams from one school to another school for evaluation, which also contributed to greater understanding an learning by the evaluators, and a system for providing structured help to poorer performers that allows them to improve faster.

This little gem of a presentation showed that the tools for improvement, for performance excellence, are there. You just have to use them, and have the will to make them work. That’s where the first criteria, Leadership, comes into play. Leadership provides the will to succeed. If leaders provide the will, you’ll find the way.

In the Land of Mickey

I’m in Orlando, the land of Mickey Mouse. I won’t see him though; I’ve been attending the ASQ Quality Management Division Conference. It was quite excellent. It’s a relatively small conference, about 600 people, but that was a good size. It provided great opportunities to meet people and have a conversation with them. I met some wonderful people, very pleasant to speak with, and interesting. You get a wide variety of people at conferences, meaning a wide variety of occupations and jobs. Even at a conference on quality management there were people from many different industries and jobs. I met people from NASA, Pratt & Whitney (the aircraft engine manufacturer), the University of Texas Cancer Center, a steel company (Gerdau Ameristeel), the US Army Corps of Engineers, a couple of consultants, a school district in Texas (Aldine Independent School District), and a student. And that’s just the people I both had a conversation with and got their business card.

I enjoy meeting new people, but this isn’t something I could do just a few years ago. I’m basically pretty shy, and never used to be able to just walk up to someone at a conference or meeting and start a conversation. That is, until I started hanging out with Frank and Ken. They’re amazing, how easily they meet people and start a conversation with them. Especially Frank. He can walk into a room and within five minutes get to know half the people like he’s known them for twenty years. So I started watching them to see how they did it, and started practicing. I found that all it really takes is just to say “hi” to someone. So that’s what I do, I just say hi to whoever I’m sitting next to or standing next to. It sure beats spending the whole conference watching everybody else talking and having a great time. Try it next you go someplace where you don’t know anyone.

I came to this conference to give two presentations, which I did. Why two? Because in the call for papers it said you could submit a maximum of two, and if you submit two, the odds of getting accepted are better. So I submitted two, and both were selected. The worst they could do is say no, right? So why not ask? I thought they went well, and since at least a few people came to both, they must have been pretty good. It feels good when someone comes up to you after your presentation and tells you they got a great gem that they were missing and are going to take it back to work with them and put it into practice. For at least one gentleman it was the methodology that I presented (and is in my book, The Small Manufacturer’s Toolkit) for selecting “the right tool for the job.” Several people got their gem from my Strategic Planning session; and that methodology for selecting the right tool for the job always turns on the light bulb for some people.

In my next post I’ll tell you where I found my gem at the conference.