Massey Faculty Member Receives McWherter Leadership Award
Management faculty member, Dr. Susan Williams, was recently recognized by the Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence (TNCPE) as the 2009 Recipient of the Ned. R. McWherter Leadership Award. The award is for Susan’s longtime commitment to helping organizations achieve performance excellence and her service to the TNCPE. The organization works within the State of Tennessee to help promote and implement the criteria for the Malcolm Baldrige National Qualityl Award. Williams previously served as a judge for the national Baldrige program which is administered through the U.S. Department of Commerce on behalf of the President.
Former Tennessee Governor McWherter’s warm remarks about Susan at the recent TNCPE banquet made it clear that she is held in the highest regard by her friends and peers in the performance excellence community. The reputations of Belmont University and The College of Business Administration are significantly enhanced by Susan’s commitment to excellence as well as the award she received from the TNCPE.
Earlier this week, Google announced its latest plans for promoting its online "PowerMeter" tool, a move that demonstrates the company is extending its mission from information management to managing personal energy data. 
Our good friend and Massey MBA Alum, Charles Hagood, writes a regular blog titled the "
It's all in good fun, of course, but what makes it funny is that we've all found ourselves scratching our heads at times and wondering the same thing. How come we seem to spend so much more time talking about doing than actually getting something done? At work, at church, at home, even personally. If you're interested in how to change this paradigm and didn't get around to this resource when it first came out, I urge you to take a look at Pfeffer & Sutton's The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). The book's certainly a great resource to read but also then to keep in a visible place in your office or at home where you won't be sucked back into the land of ideation. For a nice summary of Pfeffer and Sutton's work, visit this link at FastCompany There's also a nice summary of the book available in 
For those of you constantly looking for a fresh perspective to challenge your thinking on the topic of leadership, check out Steve Farber's blog at 
Don't you wish more city leaders had chosen the path of Coral Springs (FL) leadership?! C.S. is the 13th largest municipality in the State of Florida and late this past year they became the first municipality to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award from the U.S. President. Back in the early 1990s, city leaders decided there was a better way to run city hall than the traditional stereotypical approach. So they began making strategic decisions based on a total quality management framework designed around performance targets like resident and business satisfaction, stakeholder partnerships, and overall continuous improvement. 
Yesterday, a few of us from Belmont were treated to a first-rate tour of the national headquarters and on-site assisted-living community for a company that is continuously improving the post-retirement living experience for numerous U.S. seniors and their families.
One of our friends, Charles Hagood (Massey MBA, '93), from Healthcare Performance Partners has worked with his colleague to develop a very creative Top 10 List for how to kill one's "lean healthcare transformation". Lean techniques are making rapid gains in the healthcare industry as companies struggle with skyrocketing costs, nursing shortages and poor employee satisfaction while simultaneously facing pressure to improve healthcare service to customers. The entire Top 10 list can be found at 
The following post is from our good friend Joe Scarlett, the non-executive chairman of the board of Tractor Supply Co., the largest retail farm and ranch store chain in the United States. Joe served as the company's CEO until 2004, and more recently launched the Scarlett Leadership Institute here at Belmont. As you can imagine, he knows quite a bit about holding CEOs, and the boards who pay them, accountable for performance. 
Earlier today, U.S. Secretary Carlos Gutierrez announced the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipients for 2007. This year marks the 20th anniversay of the award initially established in 1987 through an act of the U.S. Congress at the urging of President Ronald Reagan. This is also the first year that nonprofit/government organizations were eligibile for consideration, and two of this year's winners fit that newly-defined category.
Well, yesterday, about 150 of us spent the morning learning about a different hamburger university and its parent company--Pal's Sudden Service and their Business Excellence Institute. The event was hosted by Cat Financial and billed as a "best practices sharing day" by the Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence. 
Twice in the last two weeks I've spent the better part of a day discussing performance excellence systems with area healthcare companies. As someone who is peering toward his own healthcare horizon with the perspective of an aging baby boomer, I have to admit I like the trend I'm seeing these days. We can debate issues of "motive," but the reality is that the quality and performance of healthcare systems in the U.S. is becoming an area of increasing focus by the healthcare companies themselves. Plagued by skyrocketing costs and employee resource problems, even maintaining current healthcare quality levels is no easy task. 
Consumer Reports just released its latest report on automobile reliability (October 2007), and for the first time in several years, three of Toyota's models did not make the recommended list. It just goes to show that even an organization perceived in the marketplace as the quality/reliability marketplace leader is susceptible to an occasional hiccup.