November 1998 brought the birth of a new professional organization in a meeting of leading academics held at Colorado State University. The Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence (MAAOE) brings together leaders from many disciplines who are bonded together by a shared desire to investigate, create, disseminate and apply the multidisciplinary and multicultural knowledge necessary to assist organizations in their quest for excellence. 'Organizational excellence' is used synonymously to 'business and performance excellence', that is, it is the overall way of working that balances stakeholder concerns and increases the probability of long-term organizational success through operational, customer-related, financial, and marketplace performance excellence." Organizational excellence models are used to assess international quality prize applicants and are applied by many organizations for self-assessment purposes. MAAOE's origin, vision, guiding principles and strategic intents are presented.

Key Words and Phrases: business and performance excellence; global business; organizational excellence.

Business & performance excellence models underlie America’s Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the Canada Awards for Excellence, European Quality Award, Australian Quality Award, Japan Quality Award, and most other international quality awards. While providing a means of evaluating applicants for quality prizes, such models are more typically applied as self-assessment models intended to identify organizational strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement for the purpose of strengthening organizational efficiency, effectiveness and competitive position.

By virtue of their comprehensive aim, self-assessment models require a multidisciplinary understanding of organizations. The following list of criteria provides a representative, rather than exhaustive, list of constituent criteria from international quality prize models and is sufficient to suggest the demanding nature of business and performance excellence:
 

These commonly have multiple subcriteria and issues such as measurement and metrics, technology management, knowledge and technology transfer, benchmarking, and change management are influential across most criteria.

Though the “quality” banner waves over most international prizes that are based on self-assessment models, it may not be quality that is transcendent. Confusion has surrounded the meaning of the word "quality" with the source of the confusion perhaps lying in the evolution of quality from its micro-scale description of a product to its more contemporary macro-scale description of an organization. Rather than wrangle with the distinctions between these spectral extremes, we have chosen to identify as transcendent the concept of organizational excellence. Quality exerts significant influence on organizational excellence as do, for example, leadership, innovation and various other elements – so that viewed through this lens, quality enables or drives organizational excellence and organizational excellence results – at least in part – from quality, so that the relationship between the two is a synergistic one.

The term ‘organizational excellence’ is used in a manner consistent with the meaning attached to business and performance excellence and this term rather than 'business and performance excellence' is used to imply inclusion of not-for-profit organizations. Consistent with the concept of business and performance excellence as construed by various international quality prizes, organizational excellence is defined as follows:
 
Organizational excellence is the overall way of working that balances stakeholder concerns and increases the probability of long-term organizational success through operational, customer-related, financial, and marketplace performance excellence. (Edgeman et al, 1999)

Implicit in this definition is the concept of value creation. Organizational prosperity, indeed survival, depends on value creation for stakeholders where value creation includes not only traditional shareholder and corporate measures such as profitability (Svendsen, 1998), return on investment, and stock price appreciation. In the new global economy, value creation also includes such other measures as building intellectual capital, formation of intelligent business alliances (Segil, 1996), eliminating societal ills such as abuse and poverty, and improving the efficiency of government and quasi-government entities.

The number among us that are able to honestly assert breadth and depth of knowledge and experience across such an expansive array of excellence criteria and concerns is trivial. In light of this, legitimate advancement of organizational excellence almost certainly must incorporate an alliance of individuals, institutions and disciplines. Moreover, regional or national cultural influences on organizations – and hence on excellence – are myriad, so that fruitful investigation of organizational excellence must also be multicultural and multinational.

The academic study of quality management is more advanced in Western Europe and Scandinavia than elsewhere around the globe. Supporting this statement is the recent alliance of several leading European universities to develop and offer the European Masters Programme in Total Quality Management (EMPTQM) (1997). The EMPTQM is sponsored in part by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM), one of Europe’s two principle analogues to the American Society for Quality, along with the European Organisation for Quality.

The EMPTQM is primarily education-oriented as can be gleaned from its vision: "to become an influential network of university-based learning centres in Europe that will advance the cause of Total Quality Management, as it affects products, services, work life and our natural and cultural environment." (EMPTQM, 1997)

Each participating EMPTQM institution offers a masters and, in some cases, doctoral degree in quality management. In addition to a required core curriculum, participating institutions pursue particular strengths that are manifested in specialized modules that represent one-fourth of the academic program required of programme students. Examples of specialized module content include public sector quality, creativity, learning and innovation in the Quality & Innovation Research Group at the Aarhus School of Business; quality as related to tourism at Piraeus University; health care quality at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid; and quality function deployment, experimental design for product and process improvement and reliability engineering at the Division of Quality Technology and Management at Linköping University.

The Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence, resulted from a meeting of leading academic researchers from various fields held at Colorado State University in November 1998. The initial impetus behind the formation of MAAOE was creation of a (primarily) North American entity to interact professionally with EMPTQM institutions. As formation of MAAOE neared, it became increasingly clear that interest in such an organization extended beyond North America so that MAAOE must, from the outset, be multinational. It became equally clear the MAAOE would  founding members would emphasize education less than their EMPTQM colleagues, focusing more on the creation, dissemination and application of knowledge pertinent to organizational excellence.

The core values of MAAOE and the EMPTQM are consistent, but in differing balance, and their respective core competencies are complementary. By virtue of established interpersonal relationships, individuals associated with the EMPTQM will contribute to the research-oriented mission of MAAOE and selected MAAOE participants have and will continue to contribute to EMPTQM's education-oriented mission. Increased cross-fertilization between the two organizations is anticipated.

In addition to being multinational, MAAOE is also multidisciplinary in that the primary disciplinary backgrounds of MAAOE participants are highly varied – what binds participants together is their mutual commitment to the Advancement of Society through Organizational Excellence. Among the disciplinary backgrounds of MAAOE participants are accounting, continuous quality improvement, economics, finance, human resources development, industrial and systems engineering, information technology, leadership & ethics, management, marketing, operations management, organizational behavior, psychology and statistics.

While the nature of organizational excellence implies that there is a distinct need to interact with colleagues from other disciplines with similar interests to gain a more comprehensive picture, there is consensus that this opportunity is seldom available in a single academic institution. Similarly, many professional organizations address quality, or finance, or human resource development and management, or leadership, and so forth. These organizations are typically “silo” in nature and this silo effect leads to insufficient integration of the many disciplines required to make the strides demanded by the global marketplace in the quest for organizational excellence. These issues, perhaps more than others, stimulated the formation of MAAOE wherein similarly motivated colleagues can interact both in the traditional face-to-face mode and, thanks to rapidly advancing technology, virtually.

Other concerns, questions and musings specific to the quality movement providing motivating the formation of MAAOE and use of the phrase 'organizational excellence', rather than the word 'quality' included the following:

• Has quality over-promised and under-delivered?

• Is quality management a discipline area or an integration of a ‘multiplicity of disciplines’?

• Are there analogues with the emergence of other disciplines (e.g. engineering or economics) – do we have the ‘kernel’ of the ‘organizational excellence’ discipline and if so, can we make it grow?

• Is an undergraduate degree in quality management (often the hallmark of a ‘discipline’) feasible and/or desirable? Does quality management require such breadth and maturity that it is destined to remain a postgraduate pursuit?

• Has quality management been damaged by factionalism – that is, by adherents of particular quality ‘gurus’?

•  Do we need an understanding of the fundamentals of ‘systemic thinking’ and a broad understanding of all of the business and management functional areas to be able to develop organizational excellence and cope with its inherent complexity?

Ultimately, consensus formed around the idea that organizational excellence is an emerging field, implying that its definition, direction and development are a work in progress. Fundamental to the establishment of the Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence is the desire of its members to contribute to, indeed drive, this definition, direction and development. Consistent with this desire the goals of MAAOE are to:

• Reengineer the conceptualization of the practice and role of research in addressing issues of performance in the new economy.

• Be a vehicle for influence and setting of the agenda for proactive inquiry and strategy.

• Create a critical mass of cognition and exchange of ideas that provides a supporting community of scholarship and reflection.

• Establish a process forum and mechanism for interdisciplinary groups to systematically address emerging and needs for new thought models.

• Define the supporting constructs for professional learning and development for new and experienced researchers and practitioners concerned with organizational excellence.

• Build processes to insure not only the articulation of theory to practice, but to insure the utilization of theory in practice, with appropriate feedback mechanisms to continue the influence of theory evolution.

• Systematically gather, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate what works and what does not, and disseminate that knowledge.

In summary, to:

Create and identify a critical mass of ideas and foster an international community of interdisciplinary scholarship focused on organizational excellence.

Identify and prioritize knowledge of organizational excellence and disseminate it in an effective fashion to positively affect organizational practice.

Build processes to insure the translation of theory to practice, and to ensure and participate in the application of knowledge in practice.

The TQM Magazine will be supporting this quest in its role in providing a service to practitioners and researchers alike.

Edgeman, R.L., Dahlgaard, S.M.P., Dahlgaard, J.J., and Scherer, F. (1999). "Leadership, Business Excellence Models and Core Value Deployment", Quality Progress, 32, 2, pp. pending.

EMPTQM, European Masters Programme in Total Quality Management Reference Manual (1997). Version 2 – Issue 8: 17 February 1997. Brussels, Belgium.

Segil, L. (1996), Intelligent Business Alliances, Times Business, Inc., New York.

Svendsen, A. (1998), The Stakeholder Strategy: Profiting from Collaborative Business Relationships, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco.

American Society for Quality. http://www.asq.org/

European Organisation for Quality  http://www.eoq.org/

European Foundation for Quality Management http://www.efqm.org/

Canadian National Quality Institute/Canada Awards for Excellence. http://www.nqi.ca/

Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence (1999).
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~redgeman/maaoe.html
 

John Dalrymple is Computing Devices Professor of Quality Management and Director of the Centre for Management Quality Research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Management Science and Director of the Scottish Quality Management Centre at the University of Stirling in Scotland. E-mail: john.dalrymple@ems.rmit.edu.au

Rick Edgeman is the Executive Director of MAAOE, Professor and Director of the SABER Institute for Self-Assessment & Business Excellence Research at Colorado State University and has lectured extensively internationally, including in the EMPTQM program at the Aarhus School of Business in Denmark and at Linköping University in Sweden. E-mail: redgeman@lamar.colostate.edu

Mark Finster is an Associate Professor in the Operations and Information Management Department, School of Business at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. He earned a doctorate from the University of Michigan. E-mail: mfinster@bus.wisc.edu

Jose-Luis Guerrero-Cusumano is an Associate Professor in the School of Business at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and serves as a faculty member in the EMPTQM. E-mail: GUERRERJ@gunet.georgetown.edu

Doug Hensler is W. Edwards Deming Professor of Management at the University of Colorado. A Licensed Professional Quality Engineer, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, MBA from the University of Portland, and B.S.E. from Princeton University. E-mail: hensler@colorado.edu

William C. Parr is Professor of Statistics and is the former chairperson of the Statistics Department at the University of Tennessee. He earned a doctorate from Texas A&M University and has served on the faculty of Texas A&M University. He is an experienced consultant. E-mail: William_C_Parr/UTK@ln.utk.edu