What sets a successful company apart from everyone in the industry? Is it the way of thinking within a company that promotes the quest for continuous improvement or the value a company puts on their customers’ satisfaction with the company’s product or service? There are many qualities that make a company successful. Two examples of how successful companies demonstrate what it means to be a successful is by who they are, as well as how they achieved a world-class performance level in their respective industries.
One successful company is Midway USA. They were the winner of the Malcolm Baldrige Award in 2009 for small businesses, a second successful company is, the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) which was the winner in 2007 for Non-profit organizations. We will be looking at how each company used the Baldrige National Quality Program to evaluate the effect of the company’s strategic planning process and how they evaluated its strategic directions. Also, how each company developed its critical strategies and action plans to support these directions. I will also be making recommendations for each company to help them in their quest for continuous improvement.
MidwayUSA is a family-owned catalog and internet retailer offering products for shooters, reloaders, gunsmiths, and hunters. They are a world leader in their market sector with annual revenues of $185 million. Ninety percent of the company’s total business is with U.S. retail customers, with dealers and international customers rounding out the remaining ten percent. MidwayUSA’s vision is both simple and challenging: “To be the best-run business in America for the benefit of our Customers (MidwayUSA, 2009).” To prove that they are d...
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Both these companies are well deserved of the Malcolm Baldrige Award. They are both leaders and innovators in their respective industries, and their quality management systems and quest for continuous improvement make them stand out against their competition. With this in mind, companies would greatly benefit from following their systems as a model and implementing these models to improve their own company.
Works Cited
ARDEC. (2007). The 2007 Malcom Baldrige Award. Retrieved from
www.baldrige.nist.gov/PDF_files/2007_ARDEC¬_ Application_Summary.pdf
MidwayUSA. (2009). Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award application.
Retrieved from www.baldrige.nist.gov/PDF_files/MidwayUSA_Award_
Application_Summary.pdf
Westcott, R. T. (2006). The certified manager of quality/organizational
excellence handbook. Third Edition. Milwaukee, WI: ASQ Quality Press.
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In light of an evolving market, faced with new competitors, and after a careful analysis of their current customers, the Vanguard Group (hereinafter referred to as “Vanguard”) realizes it must rethink its entire marketing strategy. However, in order to protect and leverage their competitive advantage, which is their low management fees, and to optimize the loyalty that their customers continuously demonstrate toward their organization, they must now target the most profitable segment for them, and develop the best way to serve and delight these customers.
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Toni Cade Bambara’s "The Lesson" revolves around a young black girl’s struggle to come to terms with the role that economic injustice, and the larger social injustice that it constitutes, plays in her life. Sylvia, the story’s protagonist, initially is reluctant to acknowledge that she is a victim of poverty. Far from being oblivious of the disparity between the rich and the poor, however, one might say that on some subconscious level, she is in fact aware of the inequity that permeates society and which contributes to her inexorably disadvantaged economic situation. That she relates poverty to shame—"But I feel funny, shame. But what I got to be shamed about? Got as much right to go in as anybody" (Bambara 604)—offers an indication as to why she is so hard-pressed to concede her substandard socioeconomic standing in the larger scheme of things. Sylvia is forced to finally address the true state of her place in society, however, when she observes firsthand the stark contrast between the rich and the poor at a fancy toy store in Manhattan. Initially furious about the blinding disparity, her emotionally charged reaction ultimately culminates in her acceptance of the real state of things, and this acceptance in turn cultivates her resolve to take action against the socioeconomic inequality that verily afflicts her, ensuring that "ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin" (606). "The Lesson" posits that far from being insurmountable, economic and social injustice can be risen above, but it is necessary that we first acknowledge the role that it plays in our lives, and then determine to take action against it; indifference, and the inaction that it breeds, can only serve to perpetuate such injustices.
...f who they are and what they can do. More important, "great" companies are relentless in their pursuit of not short term growth but continuous improvement. They never stop practicing the principles and ideas that made them "great" in the first place.
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recognizes quality improvement among manufacturing, service, and small business. The primary goal of the Baldrige Award is customer satisfaction. The award criteria reflect the following seven categories (Izadi et al. 1996, p. 62): leadership, information analysis, strategic quality planning, human resource development and management, management of process quality, quality and operational results, and customer focus and satisfaction.
In the mid 1980s, and into the 1990s, business leaders realized that a renewed focus on quality was required to continue to compete in an expanding global market. (NIST, 2010) Consequently, several strategic frameworks were developed for managing, and measuring organizational performance. Among them were the Malcomb Baldrige National Quality Award, which was created by and act of congress and signed into law by the President in 1987, and The Balanced Scorecard, which is a performance management tool that was born out of research conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Robert S. Kaplan, and David P. Norton published in 1996 (Kaplan, 1996). Initially the renewed emphasis on quality management systems was a reaction to the LEAN approach
J.M. Coetzee, a South African writer, chooses to set his novel Disgrace in the city section of Cape Town, Africa, a racially segregated era due to the aftermath of apartheid. Events including rape, women abuse, and manipulation occurred so often between the white citizens and the African American citizens in South Africa. The protagonist in the novel, David Lurie, faces many conflicts in the story such as rape and robbery when he leaves the city and moves to the country with his daughter Lucy. David Lurie learns the true meaning of disgrace both after witnessing his daughter being raped and when he rapes Melanie back in Cape Town. As a writer, J.M. Coetzee uses the protagonists and the struggles that he surpasses to portray a series of conflicts that can only be shown through the setting of South Africa.
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award was unreal as a typical of excellence that may facilitate U.S. organizations succeed best quality. The Malcolm Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence have vie a significant role in achieving the goals established for the Baldrige Award. They currently square measure accepted wide, not solely within the us however conjointly round the world, because the commonplace for performance excellence.
For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well. On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctually at two pm. He presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters. Waiting for him at the door of No. 113 is Soraya. This weekly rendezvous with a prostitute is the closet thing to a personal and intimate relationship Professor David Lurie has.
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee is a novel that follows the downfall of David Lurie, a South African college professor, after he loses his job for having an affair with one of his students. After being released from his position as a professor, David travels from Cape Town to the Eastern Cape to visit his daughter, Lucy. During his visit, he and Lucy encounter two men and a boy who set David on fire, rape and impregnate Lucy and rob their property. The attack causes David and Lucy’s relationship to suffer mainly due to the way that the attack alters Lucy’s personality and affections toward David. The attack and David’s relationship with his student, Melanie Isaacs, reflect each other as they both portray different scenarios regarding non-consensual relationships. Readers can gather from J.M. Coetzee’s description of Melanie as, “the dark one” (18) that Melanie was of African descent. This equates to the most striking aspect of David and Melanie’s relationship as it parallels the oppression that black women in South Africa endured historically since David Lurie, as a white man, had an inappropriate and invasive relationship with Melanie, a young African woman.
This paper aims to investigate some aspects of postcolonialism, feminism, as well as symbolism, allegories and metaphors. For this purpose I have chosen the novel Disgrace (1999) by J.M Coetzee. The story takes place in Cape Town, in post-apartheid South Africa. David Lurie is a white man and works as a professor of English at a technical university. He is a ‘communication’ lecturer and he teaches ‘romantic literature’ too. Lurie is divorced two times already and one gets the impression that he is not really satisfied with his job. His "disgrace" comes when he makes attempts to seduce Melanie Isaacs, one of his students, against her will. This affair is then remitted to the school authorities and a special committee is convoked to judge his actions.
All people, regardless of race, gender, or profession, feel shame in their lives. Shame is defined as humiliation caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behaviour. Shame researcher Brené Brown in a Ted Talk defined guilt as “I’m sorry for this mistake” whereas shame is “I am a mistake.” She also stated that vulnerability is not weakness, and shame teaches creativity, emotional risk, courage, and innovation. Shame for not satisfying society’s standard of perfection leads people of different races and genders to hate themselves, to hide their flaws, and not to take the opportunities they want, when in reality making mistakes is human. Brown concludes that shame is an epidemic in our culture, and empathy is the antidote. In American society,
The people in the company and the passion which the people have for what they were doing.