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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.