Could Baldrige Help Detroit?

If the will is there, Baldrige can show the way

As a young child, I spent most Sundays visiting my paternal grandmother in a declining inner-city neighborhood of Detroit. By then, the city had already seen large-scale losses of middle-class residents. Many had fled to suburbs that offered better public schools, more reliable services, and safer streets. Throughout the decade stretching into the 1980s, I watched my grandmother’s well-built bungalow become a virtual jail cell for her.

Yet my grandmother met the continual erosion in city services (and correspondingly, in her quality of life) with a ferocious obstinacy. No matter what happened, she would not abandon the city she had loved in better times—and the home that had witnessed her immigrant family’s years of striving to secure the American dream through decades of steady earnings from a manufacturing job. So she stayed indoors nearly 24/7 throughout her seventh decade. Doors with multiple deadbolts protected her from the pervasive robberies in the area.

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Comments

Far too big of a mess

I grew up in the Detroit suburbs and my mom was a teacher in the city for many years.

I respect what you are saying about Baldrige being useful, but Detroit is far too big of a mess for a quality improvement program to fix (and I'd say the same about Lean or Six Sigma).

Baldrige Salvation for Detroit

I lived in the Detroit suburb of Taylor some years ago when I worked at Ford in Allen Park. I like Detroit even though I only spent one Fall-Winter-Spring cycle there. I don't know if it's too late for Detroit. I would not want to give up on the city. But I agree that the timing for improvement is not the best. Deming pointed out that the best time to invest in quality is when business is booming because it will ultimately save you from any downturns and hopefully, make them more modest. But the big fault I find with Baldrige is that it does not tell you how to implement it. It's great on the what, but poor on the how. Another Deming quote, "by what method?" comes to mind. We have to have a method of getting there and it needs to be prioritized. You mentioned running the city as if it were a business. Well now that a plethora of bad business decisions have been made, the first priority must be how to mitigate them. A systematic approach using a prioritized series of steps to improvement must be planned and acted on in order for Detroit to come out of the shadows and become a glimmer of what it used to be. Handing Detroit the Baldrige burger with no way to eat it probably does not help them.

- Mike Harkins

Only fail if...

I think the Baldrige criteria could help Detroit. There is a significant amount of expertise and potential knowledge in and around Detroit to do so.

I always remember advise I ve received, "You only fail when you give up"