The Six Disciplines Blog

On the National Baldrige Performance Excellence website, there's a great article entitled "Why Take The Baldrige Journey?"

Organizations everywhere are looking for ways to effectively and efficiently meet their missions and achieve their visions. Thousands of organizations use the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence to guide their enterprises, improve performance, and get sustainable results. This proven improvement and innovation framework offers your organization an integrated approach to key management areas:

• Leadership
• Strategic planning
• Customer focus
• Measurement, analysis, and knowledge management
• Workforce focus
• Operations focus
  
• Results
  
  

Improve Your Performance

The Baldrige Criteria can be adapted to fit your unique challenges and culture and help you evaluate performance, assess where improvements or innovation are most needed, and get results. By taking the Baldrige journey, you become part of a national effort to improve America’s performance and its competitive standing in the world. You can be proud to know that your employees, customers, board members, and other stakeholders are all better off—and that America is better off.

BOTTOMLINE:   Need help implementing Baldrige criteria in your organization? Six Disciplines helps organizations implement Baldrige - faster.  Watch this short video  and contact Six Disciplines today. 

Tough times require tough decisions.

During times of economic uncertainty, strategy refinement and execution need to become a top priority for business leaders.

SWOT Analyses are one of the top-rated core services offered by Six Disciplines.  

SWOT is a strategic planning tool used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in your business.

The aim of any SWOT exercise is to identify the key internal and external factors that are important to achieving your strategy. SWOT analysis groups key pieces of information into two main categories:

• Internal factors: These are the strengths and weaknesses internal to the organization. The internal factors may be viewed as strengths or weaknesses depending upon their impact on the organizations objectives. The factors may include all of the 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion) as well as personnel, finance, manufacturing capabilities, and so on.

• External factors - The opportunities and threats presented by the external environment. The external factors may include the economy, technological change, legislation, and socio-cultural changes, as well as changes in your marketplace or competitive position.

BOTTOMLINE: While it's important to regularly conduct a SWOT analysis on your business, it's critical to revisit SWOT during times of economic uncertainty. In particular, it's essential that you focus on the internal factors that you can control; not the external factors you can't control. By focusing on internal factors, you'll be better able to unearth new opportunities for innovation.