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In his six-month association with the
Tata Group, Hank Grimmick, a veteran business
excellence consultant, found its people to be warm,
caring and committed to the organisation and the Tata
Business Excellence Model
Armed
with over 25 years of management and consulting experience,
Hank Grimmick has been helping organisations worldwide
to incorporate business excellence into the fabric of
their business. His consulting firm, Grimmick Consulting
Services, has an enviable clientele, which includes
The Boeing Company, Dolby Laboratories, Pacific Bells,
Solar Turbines and US Robotics. Mr Grimmick has been
a senior Malcolm Baldrige examiner for 13 years now
and has helped many organisations in their implementation
of business excellence.
His association with the Tata
Group is rather new, but he has already acquired a deep
understanding of the Group's quality initiative: the
Tata Business Excellence Model. For TBEM 2005, Mr Grimmick
assessed three high-performing Tata companies: Tata
Motors — CVBU, The Tinplate Company of India (TCIL)
and Tata Steel.
Soft spoken and full of humility,
Mr Grimmick comes across as being much younger than
he actually is. In his leisure, he likes playing golf
and restoring antique watches. He has taken a liking
to India and has learnt two Hindi words — chalo
and chaat. On his second trip to India, (he wore
one of his newer watches, belonging to the sixties)
to take a senior leadership programme and visit Tata
Steel, he spoke to Shubha Madhukar on excellence,
the Tata companies he has assessed and his passions
in life. Excerpts of the interview:
What was your first experience
of assessing a Tata company in June-July 2005?
I was part of the team, which assessed the Tata Motors
commercial vehicle business unit. It was my first exposure
to the Tatas and it was nice to work with an excellent
company. The experience was very positive. I found that
the people are very warm and caring, they are very committed
to the organisation and to the TBEM process and that
is a very nice combination.
We visited the Pune and Thane
operations, touring their entire facility. We visited
two different dealers and got to see their perspective
of the Tatas. Both were friendly and outgoing. But one
dealer was much more sophisticated, technological and,
to my thinking, much more representative of the Tata
image. As part of the feedback to the company, we explained
that the dealer in the customer's eye is Tata. The learning
is that if you want to be even more successful, your
dealers need to represent you the way you think they
should represent you.
You have assessed companies
in India and abroad. What is the major difference you
see in companies in India and abroad?
The Tata organisation has been conducting TBEM for 10
years. In the United States it is very hard to get an
organisation to do things consistently for 10 years.
The Tatas need to be commended because they are truly
consistent and persistent in their approach to implementing
business excellence.
The other difference I see is
a hunger to learn. In the US, there is a tendency to
be self-sufficient. There is a tendency to believe that
we know all the answers. One of the other strengths
here is the humility to accept that they don't know
everything and they are willing to seek input from external
consultants and from businesses which provide services,
such as the balanced scorecard that CVBU uses. They
are willing to benchmark and learn from other organisations.
I see that as a significant strength.
How similar or how different is the TBEM from the
Malcolm Baldrige model?
In terms of the criteria, they are organic. In terms
of the technology or the approach to the assessment,
there are some differences. In both cases the applicants
write a feedback report, individual assessors review
that report and develop an individual feedback. In both
cases they will reach a consensus and in both cases
they will have a site visit followed by a final feedback.
The differences are more in the
mechanism. In the Baldrige process for instance, after
the assessors have reviewed the application, there is
a judges panel which decides, based solely on scores,
whether the applicant will go to the consensus stage
and to the site visit stage. So there is a weeding out
in the Baldrige process. There may be 50 applications
and only 12 out of them will reach to the site visit
stage. Also, in Baldrige, the consensus is typically
done telephonically and there is a timelag of several
weeks or months between the consensus and site visit,
which is not so for the TBEM.
What would you say is positive
about the TBEM?
It has persistence; it has been going strong for 10
years. It is strongly supported by senior-level members
of the Tata Group, and that's important, because if
it were not, it would be considered an exercise that
we do and then we go back to run the business the same
as always.
Is it not so with the Baldrige
process also? Are senior members not associated with
the process?
They are but not to the same level. When companies apply
for the Baldrige, usually senior managers are strongly
supportive but not always. And not always do the companies
apply to improve their processes; they do it to win
a prize. I hope there are not many of them but there
are some cases.
The advantage of the TBEM process
is that organisations seem to truly want the feedback.
I base this on CVBU. They want the feedback and they
want to do something about it. In fact, what I have
seen in the three companies (CVBU, TCIL and Tata Steel)
whose applications I have reviewed, they have actively
acted upon the feedback, using it as a way to drive
to excellence.
Tinplate, Tata Steel and CVBU,
all three have had crises. And the interesting thing
is that the crisis is what forced them to embrace the
TBEM. It would be nice if they embraced it because they
were doing well. That didn't happen, but that's all
right. At least they did choose to go after it. I think
that is a definite plus. In the US, the expression we
use is "it's a burning bridge". They had a
burning bridge, they had to choose, they couldn't get
off the bridge, and they had to do something.
Do you have any concerns regarding
the TBEM?
The Tatas have been doing it for 10 years; there are
a number of high scoring organisations and that is wonderful.
To get from 100 to 200 is easy, to get from 400 to 500
is difficult, and to get from 600 to 700 is world-class
performance. I am concerned that companies such as the
ones we have talked about could lose interest because
they do not see significant changes in their score.
They are probably seeing improvements in the organisation
but if they do not see changes in the scores there could
be a perception that the improvements are not as a result
of the TBEM but a result of something else. So why do
TBEM?
Also, I'm concerned that some
assessors in the past and some in the future, will worry
too much about the details, the nitty gritty, and lose
sight of the big picture which is the most important
thing about the process, that is, driving improvement
in your organisation.
How are such excellence models
helping organisatons in improvement and growth?
The Baldrige and TBEM look at the entire organisation
and are holistic in their view. It forces you to think
not just about process efficiency but also about efficiency
and effectiveness in leadership and strategy, and customer-centricity.
It doesn't tell you what to do, which is strength in
itself, but it asks you to be thoughtful and consider
what you have to do. That tends to drive the organisation
to improvement as opposed to specific functionalities.
Then, it gives the organisation
an opportunity to measure itself in a way that few other
approaches do. If you use the score as a metric to view
how you are faring relative to last year, relative to
a class, then it can be helpful in validating the improvement
you are driving or, in fact, the improvement should
drive the organisation.
In terms of growth, the Baldrige
and TBEM processes cause you to focus on both upgradation
of efficiency and forward-looking approaches such as
growing the business, which includes growing of capabilities,
people, community, everything. And that's where I think
the Baldrige or the TBEM process helps build the organisation.
Do cultural factors play a
role in implementing business excellence?
Yes, for a number of reasons. Firstly, in the Indian
culture — from my experience not just here in India,
but my acquaintances, my next-door neighbours are from
India, some of my clients are Indians — a general
trait is a gentle politeness. In the US there is a rude
brashness. There are times when both of those traits
are positive and there are times when both of those
traits can be negative.
Another difference in general:
the American culture embraces risk, encourages innovation,
creativity; the Indian culture tends to be risk-averse,
tends to encourage a consistency in a positive way but
can also go the other way.
One of the strengths of the Indian
culture is a reasonable amount of homogeneity. The advantage
in Indian culture is that there is consistency of thought,
so you can get going in a certain direction. The disadvantage
of that and advantage for the US is that there is a
wide diversity of thoughts, wide diversity of styles,
and that can stimulate a potential for more innovation
and more creativity.
What does quality in a company
mean to you?
Quality in a company includes a genuine passion for
customers, employees, and the direction and mission
of the organisation. If these things are in place the
organisation will care about what the customer needs,
will make certain that the customers get what they need
and ensure that it is done in an effective and efficient
manner. It is definitely not product quality, it's not
process quality and it's not costing quality; it is
more. I must tell you I don't like the word quality,
even though I used to work for quality consulting organisations,
I disliked the word quality because it is subjective.
The word I like better, which is just as subjective,
is excellence.
We have this problem across the
board, there is good quality and bad quality; high quality
and low quality; special quality etc. I don't know what
it means. So when I answered what is quality; I really
answered what is excellence.
But isn't even the word excellence
too comparative a term?
It is. It is subjective and comparative. But the word
quality has so much baggage with it. It's a useless
word. I am in fact trying to take the word quality out
of the Malcolm Baldrige vernacular. I have succeeded
a little bit: it used to be called Baldrige criteria;
we now call it criteria for performance excellence.
It's still called the Malcolm Balridge National Quality
Awards and I'm going to continue to push to see if I
can make it Malcolm Baldridge National Awards for Excellence.
What is Hank Grimmick like
outside of his professional life?
Let me tell you what a psychologist told me once.
One organisation I was at, all the senior leadership
went through a psychological evaluation of our strengths,
opportunities, improvement, etc. The psychologist told
me I was socially bold. What that meant was I will sometimes
take social risk perhaps because I don't have a theorem,
I don't intend to offend and so therefore I don't think
I am going to offend and that's why for example I'll
ask provocative questions.
The other thing, there was an
entertainment organisation in Florida that had a tagline
which describes my view of the world: there is no such
thing as too much fun. I believe in absolutely living
and loving life.
What are your leisure activities?
I play golf anywhere from very well to very plain. I
also restore antique watches. I look for antique pocket
watches from the 19th or 20th century. My fun is restoring
old wristwatches, I have wristwatches dating back to
the early 20th century onwards. This (indicating to
the one he is wearing) is one of the newer ones; it
is from the sixties.
I used to be an engineer.
My wife told me once I needed a hobby and I had a bunch
of watches around, so I started taking them apart and
putting them back together again. I've got 30 or 40
wristwatches and 30 or 40 pocket watches, and I have
got another hundred or so waiting to come back to life
again. I pay a dollar or two for them and then restore
them and wear them sometimes. But the problem is when
you have 30 wristwatches and two wrists, the most you
can do is wear them once or twice a month. And that
is if you wear one on each wrist.
Uploaded
on March 9, 2006
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