The Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence (MAAOE) was formed in late 1998 with a vision of creating, disseminating and applying knowledge relevant to the advancement of organizational excellence. MAAOE sees next-generation quality management as being multinational, multidisciplinary and performance- focused and its participant profile is consistent with that view, numbering approximately 250 individuals from a broad array of disciplinary backgrounds that hail from more than 20 nations on five continents. The MAAOE vision is supported by three strategic intentions, each with several supporting goals and objectives. Herein MAAOE's first strategic intention, that of creation of knowledge relevant to the advancement of organizational excellence, is investigated. Organizational excellence is regarded as 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. Parallels and analogies to the development of scientific theory are used to illustrate the development of quality management and to suggest directions that must be taken to move into the aforementioned 'next generation'.

A recent Quality Engineering article by Dalrymple, Edgeman, Finster, Guerrero-Cusumano, Hensler and Parr (1) detailed the founding, vision, consonant goals and objectives and strategic intentions of a new organization focused on organizational excellence. This new organization, founded in November 1998 and called the Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence or MAAOE, chose to use "organizational excellence" to span the more common terms "business excellence" or "performance excellence" that are in more prominent use. For example, the model developed by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) to support the European Quality Award and variations of this model used by various European daughter quality award programs are referred to as "business excellence" models while the model upon which America's Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is based is called a "performance excellence" model. No substantial distinctions exist between these models that would lead one to be referred to as a business excellence model and the other as a performance excellence model. Indeed, the difference is semantic alone and it would be appropriate to call all of aforementioned models by one name, the other, or perhaps a combination of the two such as "business and performance excellence models". In an effort to capture the spirit of these, MAAOE chose "organizational excellence" as the operative term.
 

It is by now widely known that while the aforementioned international awards are called "quality" awards that, indeed, the underlying models investigate excellence across many dimensions, recognizing that true excellence is achieved only by successfully integrating these dimensions. For cognitive purposes, it may be of value in this context to think of "quality" as a synonym for "excellence" so that our concept of "quality" includes but extends vastly beyond the old paradigms of defect levels and quality of features, products or services. While the dimensions of excellence that are evaluated vary somewhat depending on the specific model applied, there are many commonalities to these models and interested readers are referred to the Baldrige and EFQM websites (2), (3). Indeed, examination of the criteria of various international "quality" awards indicates strong convergence regarding these dimensions.
 

Fundamentally such models are used by organizations to self-assess across constituent dimensions of excellence for the purpose of driving organizational strategy. This is accomplished by identifying organizational strengths, weaknesses, and areas targeted for improvement across each of the examined dimensions. In the end, this information is used to formulate strategy that, if properly deployed, will strengthen organizational efficiency, effectiveness and competitive position. In short, it is not quality alone that is of importance to organizational excellence. Applying this rotation of strategy formulation, deployment, and assessment on an annual or similar basis is essentially equivalent to implementation of Deming's PDSA cycle at the organizational level, applied with the goal of organizational excellence in mind.
Having said this, MAAOE employs the following definition of organizational excellence: "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." (4)
 

Those who have followed changes in the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria or those of the European Quality Award know that organizational excellence is still in its formative stage. Consistent with the vision statement of the Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence, the hope of this new organization is to positively contribute to this effort. That vision statement is repeated here for convenience:
 

• “The Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence aims to be the premier interdisciplinary organization driving organizational excellence through creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge relevant to the advancement of organizational excellence." (5)

The guiding strategy for fulfillment of MAAOE's goals includes a focus on the creation, dissemination and application of the multidisciplinary and multicultural knowledge necessary to assist organizations in their quest for excellence. With regard to knowledge creation, MAAOE's strategic intention is to "create and identify a critical mass of ideas and foster an international community of interdisciplinary scholarship focused on organizational excellence. "  (1)
 

One of the major responsibilities that the members of MAAOE must accept is the requirement to create new knowledge. The creation of new knowledge is both demanding and rewarding for those who accept that responsibility. The flight from the word ‘quality’ that is being played out on the world stage is occurring as a result of the tainted nature that the word has attracted over the past couple of decades arising from the perception that the pursuit of  ‘quality’ has not delivered the benefits promised by proponents of the ‘quality message’.
 

There are those who have deserted and shunned the word ‘quality’ for that reason and that reason alone. There are others who have determined that the word ‘quality’ does not adequately describe the reality that they are espousing, even when coupled with the words ‘total’ and ‘management’, or any other combination of clarifying or qualifying words. Although this is a more principled position, it may, nevertheless, be based on a difficulty that has not been fully confronted and hence constitutes an ‘easy way out’.
 

These issues have not necessarily stemmed the flow of publications by authors, who are often the same people who are leading the flight from the word ‘quality’. Much of the literature deals with theory and implementation of ‘quality management programs’, without appropriate definition of what this means. The knowledge creation responsibilities which MAAOE must embrace must be addressed at three levels, the development of theory, the evolution of new methods, techniques and approaches and the meticulous and searching research of what does and what does not work – and why.

The disparate and, often disconnected activities that can be described as ‘quality management ‘ or ‘total quality management’ have often created confusion among those to whom quality programs have been ‘done’. In many cases, a collection of techniques has been presented to an unsuspecting workforce in the form of ‘quality training’. Often, the training was entirely unconnected to the work that those being trained were engaged in, or worse, they thought that it was! In other cases, one particular aspect has been focused on, say ‘top management commitment’ – with the consequence that a ‘leadership’ program has been prescribed for unconvinced and uncommitted ‘top management’. ‘Communication’ followed close behind, when these other panaceas failed. ‘Empowerment’ became a focus as the missing ingredient, particularly when the issues of service quality rather than product quality came into vogue.
 

In parallel, there were the various ‘gurus’, all of whom had their own approach to ‘making it all happen’. Deming had his 14 points (6), whilst Crosby had his 14 step procedure. Peters went ‘in search of excellence’ (7) while Camp introduced ‘benchmarking’ (8), and Hammer developed ‘business process reengineering’ (9). Many of these approaches were pursued with vigor reminiscent of the Crusades – and in some cases with an equal proportion of bigotry, with one group of followers deriding and belittling the work and contribution of the other or others.
 

Physical scientists and those who have an interest in the history and philosophy of science will recognize a number of the phenomena that are common to the development of unifying theory in the emerging and developing physical sciences. Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (10) outlined in detail the nature of the evolution of scientific theory. Contrary to the way that science may be portrayed in retrospect, coherent theory did not present itself as self-evident and internally consistent to the scientists of the time.
 

The periods leading up to the theories that we now take for granted were invariably characterized by a confusion of experiments and observations that were themselves based on sound scientific method. However, they invariably appeared to be inconsistent, or unconnected or unrelated to one another. It is only when a coherent theory evolves from all of the evidence that the apparent inconsistencies can be reconciled. Along the way, Kuhn suggests, there is a tendency on the part of the scientists who ‘know what the world is like’ to dismiss, suppress or ignore evidence that does not fit well with the theoretical position that they espouse. This evasion can only be sustained for a limited period of time, because, eventually the weight of evidence becomes so overwhelming that the reactionary forces are overcome and a new coherent theory emerges to replace the one with which the evidence was eventually so clearly in conflict.
 

Kuhn introduces the idea of ‘paradigms’ which he describes as having two characteristics (10), namely, “Their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity.” and “Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.” Through this definition, Kuhn introduced a definition of paradigm and related what we would now call ‘paradigm shift’ to changes in the direction that scientific thought took when viewed from the perspective of the historian of science. Kuhn’s motivation was to find a way of distinguishing between those who practiced what he termed ‘normal science’ and those scientists who were capable of ‘thinking outside the box’ as we might call it today. ‘Normal science’ is where research is based on commitment to the same sets of rules and standards for scientific practice, which are the prerequisites for the genesis and perpetuation of a particular research tradition.
 

Kuhn characterizes a paradigm shift as the transition from one paradigm to another, naturally. This shift occurs when a choice must be made between an existing paradigm that faces an accumulation of contradictory evidence so great that it can no longer be ignored, and an immature state of science in which the collection of scientific endeavor has not yet achieved the stage of establishing a paradigm.
 

An illustration that can be used to paint the portrait of shifting paradigms is that of the development of the theory of light. The Newtonian theory taught that light was made up of material corpuscles or matter. This theory was accepted from the end of the seventeenth century until the work of Young and Freznel in the early nineteenth century that postulated that light was a transverse wave motion. There, a paradigm shift took place that replaced the Newtonian paradigm of light as matter with the paradigm of light as a wave motion. In the early twentieth century, the work of Planck, Einstein and others introduced the quantum mechanical entity of light as a photon that exhibits both matter and wave characteristics. This was a further paradigm shift. In each case, there was an existing body of knowledge and an orthodoxy that became increasingly indefensible in the face of the scientific evidence. As theory developed, a new paradigm emerged.
 

If we now look to how light was considered, described or viewed, prior to the work of Newton, it is quite clear that there was no single coherent generally accepted view or description of what light was. Rather, there were a variety of schools of thought that used one of the theories from classical times as a basis. In other words, in the period that preceded Newton, there was no single paradigm that described the nature of light. Rather, there were a variety of theories that drew strength from the fact that they succeeded in providing the best explanation for a subset of the observations that were available. Other observations were either explained on an ad hoc basis or left as problems that would be tackled by further research.
 

This, then, brings us to the current state of ‘quality management’. It may be that there are parallels between the pre-Newtonian state of physical optics and the current stage of development of ‘quality management’. If this is so, then what is required is that work must be done to establish a paradigm within which the future of quality management research can be determined. At present, there appear to be various ‘schools of thought’ which best explain some of the observations which are made in the field of quality management, whilst ignoring others or treating them on an ad hoc basis, and leaving others again as problems to be tackled by further research. An important task in the knowledge creation activities must be to participate in the search for a paradigm of quality management to be used as the basis for future quality management research. This is a fundamental research problem that must be informed by research activity and knowledge creation in the fields of development of the discipline and application. Indeed, it is the view of MAAOE that next-generation quality management is multinational, multidisciplinary and performance-focused (11).

There are a number of areas where the research community has poorly served the quality movement in that this community has failed to rise to the challenges that have presented themselves. One area has been in the treatment of the not-for-profit and public sectors. Much of the literature relating to quality improvement and the application of quality management has been based entirely on the requirements of the business enterprise. In the business enterprise, the pursuit of profit is fundamental to the reason for existence. This has been tempered more recently by the introduction of such concepts as the ‘triple bottom line’ that acknowledges that there may be environmental and social imperatives which must be taken into account in the pursuit of profit. However, the fundamental role of the business enterprise is to maximize value for shareholders.
 

When we take this into account, such ideas as increasing market share, creating more jobs etc., which are well-characterized by the “Deming chain reaction” fit very well with the underpinning philosophy of quality management. Here, the concept of ‘quality costs’ including ‘failure costs’ etc. can be readily related to the activities and pursuits of the business enterprise, where the common currency is one which fits well with other financial measures. In the business enterprise, there is also usually a direct relationship between measures like increasing market share and the availability of increasing resources to produce the goods or services that the business enterprise trades in. This is the essence of the Deming chain reaction.
 

There would be little dissent from the view that, in the case of not-for-profit and public sector organizations, the approaches and methods of quality management should be applied and that they have a contribution to make. However, how do the Deming chain reaction and similar keystones of quality thinking relate to these sectors? In the public sector, services frequently have to be provided on a fixed annual budget. Improved services that attract greater market share, therefore, result in fewer resources to provide each unit of service, rather than more. How can we relate this to the Deming chain reaction?
 

When education is provided in the public sector, how do we assess ‘failure costs’ in the context of a child’s education? Similarly, where social services are provided to improve the quality of life of elderly citizens, how should we evaluate failure costs in that instance. There are too many examples from the public and not-for-profit sectors to enumerate, but these examples perhaps serve to illustrate the fact that the quality movement has been complacent about the portability of some aspects of the philosophy from the environment of the business enterprise. The research community has a duty of care to address some of these issues of portability in a way that relates the pursuit of quality management activity to the reasons for the existence of public and not-for-profit sector organizations, rather than taking it as a ‘given’ that “quality is good for you”.
 

The research community also has a responsibility to initiate and, in some cases, continue the process of ‘technological scanning’ to ensure that developments in other disciplines which may contribute to the work of people in the discipline are alerted to the potential benefits of those developments. They must also be made accessible to the people in the discipline.
 

The research community has a further responsibility to initiate and participate in the search for and development of new tools, techniques and approaches that will, in some cases, lead and therefore, create the demand for their use. The research community must also respond to the demand for new tools, techniques and approaches to the solution of practitioner community problems. There is a further responsibility to ensure that the reliability and validity of the tools, techniques and approaches are tested to ensure that effort is not dissipated and disrepute attracted by tardy, misguided or inappropriate work

One important element of MAAOE's strategic intention is the cataloguing of present knowledge and the creation on new knowledge that drives organizational excellence. These activities may well require a "virtual faculty" comprised of both academics and practitioners across the globe that practice the exchange of information and problems for the purpose of development of a relevant knowledge base.
 

Some exchanges will be among academic disciplines for the purpose of combining the current knowledge of each discipline that has a bearing upon organizational excellence.  This synthesis of knowledge will lead to theories about how to effectively manage modern organizations. Other exchanges will be among academic researchers and practitioners.  For example, practitioners may share observations about the methods and practices they utilize in an attempt to solve problems their organizations typically face.  Still other exchanges will be among practitioners sharing experiences to identify better practices for their organizations.  As a result, the "faculty" will have a common awareness of relevant organizational problems and be in a position to design and try out new methods to achieve organizational excellence.  The results of these experiments can be fed back to the "faculty" so they can modify these theories as a preponderance of evidence demands.
Given the above, MAAOE adopted as the aforementioned strategic intent to create and identify a critical mass of ideas and foster an international community of interdisciplinary scholarship focused on organizational excellence. Supporting this intent are three specific objectives.
 

The first knowledge creation objective is to encourage the creation of theory and applied interdisciplinary research.  There are four planned elements that will be instrumental in realization of this objective.
 

• First, current information from various academic disciplines needs to be gathered and synthesized to build a foundation of knowledge that is part of organizational excellence.  This involves identification of researchers from different disciplines that are interested in participating in this effort, creating opportunities for these researchers to share relevant theories from their respective disciplines, working to understand the relevant theories, and working to synthesize the relevant knowledge into theories about organizational excellence.

• Second, academics and practitioners need to exchange information about each other's worlds with the purpose of understanding the issues that are relevant to organizational excellence.  This involves creation of opportunities for academics and practitioners to interact such as practitioners presenting some of their more difficult problems to academics, academics spending time working in actual organizations, practitioners teaching in universities, and exchange programs between universities and businesses.

• Third, partnerships need to be established between universities and businesses to design strategies that will, in theory, enhance organizational excellence and to help businesses implement these strategies. This involves academics becoming aware of complex business problems and getting the input from a variety of disciplines to bring an array of expertise to bear on these problems.  Once these problems have been viewed from a variety of perspectives and improvement strategies have been developed experiments need to be conducted in actual organizations to study the impact of the proposed strategies.  These efforts will facilitate academics and practitioners seeing the big picture in organizations and in the application of theory in an integrated manner to deal with difficult business problems.

• Finally, there is the need for an infrastructure to support all of these activities.  This infrastructure should involve research collations among a variety of businesses and various academic institutions.  There needs to be an efficient means to access known information about business performance excellence and there needs to be real time links to enable easy exchange of information and an easy way to get answers to current questions when they arise.

• First, current knowledge about organizational excellence needs to be gathered and shared among participants.  This includes the methods that work and the context in which these methods are most effective.  This information can be gathered from examination of the practices that are used by current organizations including the barriers to the implementation of common practices, from searching for identified "best practices", and from study of the practices of leading edge organizations in order to identify new management practices. The source of information should include the criteria for the Deming prize, the criteria for the Baldrige award, the requirements for ISO certification, benchmarks for the current best known practices, and other similar resources.

• Second, the information gathered needs to be evaluated and synthesized into a body of methods that can be recommended to actual businesses.  This involves gathering information about when particular practices have been successfully implemented and when they have not been successful, leading to an evaluation of the conditions under which each practice can be recommended.

• Third, practices that need further study need to be identified.  This involves having researchers from various disciplines examine practices for possible gaps and to identify missing components that when not in place may lead to implementation problems.

• First, data needs to be gathered about professional development and training programs related to organizational excellence that are currently available.

• Second, this information needs to be analyzed to determine which of these practices should be shared with the MAAOE network and to determine if there is any development pieces missing.

• Third, this knowledge needs to be shared with experts in universities and businesses so that they become aware of the current knowledge trends.

• Fourth, current knowledge needs to be transferred to practitioners in business and to current students who will the future practitioners and future academics.

Noted in (1) were two other strategic intentions of MAAOE. While these will be expanded upon in future contributions to Quality Engineering, they are repeated here for the sake of completeness.

The second strategic intent of the Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence is that of disseminating knowledge relevant to organizational excellence for the purpose of positively affecting organizational practice. This requires not only the cataloguing and discovery activities necessary to knowledge creation, but also prioritization of that knowledge for distribution purposes. Consistent with the strategic intent of knowledge dissemination, MAAOE formulated three objectives:
 

• to set in place and manage a process that identifies knowledge and issues relevant to organizational excellence;
• to set in place and manage a process that prioritizes and organizes knowledge and issues relevant to organizational excellence; and
• to develop and manage vehicles to communicate knowledge of organizational excellence to scholars, practitioners, students, and other users in a usable form.

MAAOE's third strategic intention relates to the application of knowledge relevant to the advancement of organizational excellence through organizational practice by building processes to insure the translation of theory to practice, and to insure and participate in the application of knowledge in practice. Three objectives were formulated that MAAOE believes will assist in fulfilling this intention:
 

• create partnerships with organizations to execute research opportunities in testing application of theory into excellence in organization practice;
• take a leadership role in the development and validation of models, methods, and meters for measurement of organizational performance; and
• provide professional learning and development experiences related to operational excellence for executives, practitioners, and both new & experienced researchers.

In the field of application, the greatest responsibility vested in the research community is to conduct rigorous research into the application of the tools, techniques and approaches of quality management, faithfully recording evidence and results of implementation activity. The dissemination of the results of these activities must detail those things that work and provide the benefits that were expected and anticipated and those for which the results were less than satisfactory. The literature of successful applications and implementations is rather extensive, while the paucity of case studies relating failure and analyzing the reasons for failure might lead one to believe that the panacea is already available. The evidence of numerous surveys of companies that have had some sort of improvement program indicates that either the sample of the literature about successes may be biased or the sample in the surveys may be biased or there is a significant under-reporting of failure.
 

Organizational excellence is attainable, but the investment required can be substantial and the process of identifying, customizing and implementing best practices frustrating. The Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence was created with the purpose of creating, disseminating and applying knowledge relevant to the advancement of organizational excellence, defined herein as 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.
 

In the present work, attention was focused on discovery of knowledge relevant the advancement of organizational excellence. The discovery process includes both creation of such knowledge as well as investigation into current practices to assess which of these practices produce good fruit and which practices produce bad fruit and the conditions leading to the growth or withering of that fruit. Future contributions to Quality Engineering will attend to the issues of dissemination and application of that knowledge.

1. Dalrymple, J., Edgeman, R.L., Finster, M., Guerrero-Cusumano, J.-L., Hensler, D.A., and Parr, W.C. (1999). A White Paper: Quality at the Crossroads  of Organizational Excellence and the Academy. Quality Engineering, 12, 1, 97-104.

2. European Foundation for Quality Management (1999). EFQM ‘Improved’ Model for Business Excellence. http://www.efqm.org

3. Baldrige National Quality Award Program (1999). United States Department of Commerce Technology Administration, Gaithersburg, Maryland. http://www.nist.gov

4. Edgeman, R.L., Dahlgaard, S.M.P., Dahlgaard, J.J., and Scherer, F. (1999). On Leaders and Leadership: Business Excellence Models, Core Value Deployment and Lessons from the Bible. Quality Progress, 32, 10, 49-54.

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

6. Deming, W.E. (1986). Out of the Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Studies.

7. Peters, T. and Waterman, R.H. (1988). In Search of Excellence : Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies . New York: Warner Books.

8. Camp, R. H. (1989). Benchmarking : The Search for Industry Best Practices That Lead to Superior Performance. Milwaukee: American Society for Quality.

9. Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1994). Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. New York: Harperbusiness

10. Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

11. Dalrymple, J., Edgeman, R.L., Finster, M., Guerrero-Cusumano, J.-L., Hensler, D.A., and Parr, W.C. (1999). Next-Generation Quality Management: Multnational, Multidisciplinary and Performance-Focused. The TQM Magazine, 11, 3, 138-141.

12. Karney, D. and Hillmer, S. (1999). MAAOE Strategic Intent #1: Creation of Knowledge Relevant to the Advancement of Organizational Excellence. http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/District/1798/maaoe-knowledge-list.html

John Dalrymple is CDC Professor in the Centre for Management Quality Research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. He was previously Professor of management Science at Stirling University in Scotland.

Dennis Karney is a Professor in the School of Business at Kansas University in Lawrence, Kansas where he is the Ned N. Fleming Distinguished Teaching Professor. Dennis earned the doctoral degree from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1980.

Steve Hillmer is a Professor in the School of Business at Kansas University in Lawrence, Kansas where he has been since 1977. Steve earned the Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in 1976.

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.

Gary Geroy is a Professor in the College of Applied Human Sciences at Colorado State University. He previously served on the faculty of Pennsylvania State University.