A White Paper:
Quality at the Crossroads of Organizational Excellence & the Academy

In November 1998, faculty from leading academic research institutions gathered at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado to explore issues surrounding business & performance excellence and to determine whether cause warranting formal foundation of an alliance focused on business and performance excellence exists. Principle among results of the meeting are formation of such a vehicle, the Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence (MAAOE) along with development of MAAOE's vision, consonant goals and objectives. Background is provided herein regarding MAAOE's origin, vision, guiding principles, strategic intents, goals, objectives and founding members. Subsequent contributions to this journal will detail international forces driving the formation of this "multinational" alliance and on each of MAAOE's strategic intents.
Business & performance excellence models underlie virtually all international quality prizes, including North America's two major prizes - America's Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the Canada Awards for Excellence - and such other familiar prizes as the European and Australian Quality Awards. While providing a means of evaluating applicants for quality prizes, such models are fundamentally self-assessment models intended to identify organizational strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement for the purpose of strengthening organizational efficiency, effectiveness and competitive position.
The rationale behind formation of an interdisciplinary alliance of academic researchers is evident upon examining the criteria of the models supporting various international quality prizes. The following list of criteria provides a representative, rather than exhaustive, list of constituent criteria of such models and is sufficient to suggest the interdisciplinary nature of business and performance excellence:
 

Leadership	Policy & Strategy	People & Knowledge
Resources	Partners / Partnerships	Innovation & Learning
Society	Customer Focused Processes	Information & Analysis
Customers	Organizational Performance	Business Results

Generally, each of these has subcriteria and issues such as measurement and metrics, technology management, knowledge and technology transfer, benchmarking, and change management are integral across criteria.

Though "quality" is the moniker under which most international prizes based on self-assessment models are known, it is not quality that is transcendent. But what is that which is transcendent? Lacking an agreed upon label, it is a highly challenging target around which MAAOE's name was selected - business and performance excellence or, as agreed upon after much deliberation, organizational excellence. This perspective suggests that quality contributes significantly to organizational excellence as do, for example, leadership, innovation and various other criteria - so that viewed in this context, quality is an enabler or driver of organizational excellence and organizational excellence is - at least in part - a result or output of quality.

How many among us can legitimately assert such breadth and depth of knowledge and experience across such an expansive array of criteria as to warrant the label of "organizational excellence aficionado"? Presumably, the count is trivial, so that an approach to the 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 many so that legitimate investigation of organizational excellence must also be multicultural and multinational.

MAAOE intends that the term 'organizational excellence' is generally consistent with the meaning attached to business and performance excellence and uses this term rather than 'business and performance excellence' to imply inclusion of not-for-profit organizations. Consistent with the concept of business and performance excellence as construed by various international quality prizes, organization excellence is defined as:
 

• 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. (1)

The academic study of "quality management" is more advanced in Western Europe and Scandinavia than elsewhere around the globe. Support for this statement is the recent alliance of several leading European universities to develop and offer the European Masters Programme in Total Quality Management (EMPTQM) (2). 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 (3), along with the European Organisation for Quality (4).

While the institutional participation in the EMPTQM has evolved since its mid-1990s formation, those involved at one time or another include the Aarhus School of Business (Denmark), Linköping University of Technology (Sweden), Piraeus University (Greece), University College Galway (Ireland), University of Kaiserslautern (Germany), Sheffield Hallam University (England), Université de Versailles St Quentin-en-Yvelines (France), Université de Toulon et du Var (France), Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), and the University of Naples (Italy). Individuals driving the participating EMPTQM programs are include founders of their respective national quality awards and members of the Governing Board of the European Quality Award.

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." (2) The EMPTQM fulfills this vision via pursuit of its mission "to develop and implement education and research programmes that meet world-class standards in order to create value for: all European private and public organisations of all sizes; participating universities; participating students; EFQM; and the European Union" (2). In turn the vision and mission extend to a number of values (2), some of which are:
 

• To promote and apply the principles and philosophy of TQM in the operation of all relevant educational and research activities.
• To facilitate the diffusion of TQM in private businesses and public or semi-public organisations.
• To recognise, respect and view the diversity in cultural values in participating countries as a source of strength for the programme, rather than an impediment to creative and productive cooperation.
• To develop genuine facilitating personal relationships with academic colleagues in all participating universities.
• To respect the need for confidentiality in joint projects with other organisations for the protection of parties volunteering restricted information.
• To encourage alliances with other scientific, professional and other organisations with similar goals in Europe and other continents for the purpose of advancing the cause of Total Quality worldwide.

Each participating EMPTQM institution offers a masters and, in some cases, doctoral degree in quality management. The EMPTQM employs carefully crafted core curriculum that balances strategic and tactical aspects of TQM and is offered at each of the institutions. The core curriculum represents one-fourth of the program with the remainder of the program being divided equally across the so-called "European dimension", a set of specialized modules elaborating on selected themes or supporting methods relating to TQM, and a thesis.

Participating institutions pursue particular strengths that are manifested in the specialized modules. 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.

Fulfillment of the "European dimension" may be accomplished in various manners, but essentially requires that minimally 25% of the candidate's program of study be completed at one or more of the remaining participating institutions. Alternatively, EMPTQM participants may fulfill the European dimension by successfully completing courses taught by approved visiting professors, by completing their thesis at a sister-EMPTQM institution under the (joint) supervision of a professor at that institution and one at their home institution, by enrolling in the EMPTQM summer school, held in Barcelona, Spain in 1997, Aarhus, Denmark in 1998 and Versailles, France in 1999, or by an approved combination of these options. In contrast to singly authored theses completed by graduate students at American universities, the EMPTQM theses often result from a joint effort of two students and commonly involve a high level quality management application at a sponsoring enterprise.

While the number of institutions participating in the EMPTQM approximates the number of non-European institutions worldwide offering quality management graduate degrees, there are numerous additional European institutions that offer either significant graduate level study in quality management or quality management masters and / or doctoral degrees. Included among these are Trinity College - Dublin (Ireland), University of Limerick (Ireland), Luleå University of Technology (Sweden), University of Malmö (Sweden), University of Gothenburg (Sweden), Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), Norwegian Business School (Norway), Stirling University (Scotland), Napier University (Scotland), Newcastle-Upon-Tyne University (England), Bradford University (England), Nottingham-Trent University (England), University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen (the Netherlands) and University of Tor Vergata (Italy). Though somewhat less developed at this writing, several universities in Central and Eastern Europe, including the Technical University of Budapest (Hungary) and the Technical University of Ostrava (Czech Republic) are progressing in their quality management course offerings. Moreover, at the bridge between Europe and Asia, Baskent University in Turkey has developed a masters program in TQM.

Consistent with the aforementioned EMPTQM value of encouraging alliances with scientific, professional and other organizations with similar goals in Europe and other continents for the purpose of advancing the cause of total quality worldwide, EMPTQM member institutions deliberated the merit of building a worldwide network of quality management faculty in the months leading up to the 1997 annual EFQM meeting, held in Munich, Germany. Other than limited existing Asian relationships, contacts sufficiently well-developed to the make rapid progress on this initiative elsewhere around the globe and in North America in particular did not exist at that time. Still, the determination was made to attempt to develop necessary contacts.

At that point the Quality & Innovation Research Group, Department of Information Science at Aarhus School of Business in Denmark extended a Visiting Professor offer to Rick Edgeman of Colorado State University for the 1997-98 academic year. During that period Dr. Jens Jørn Dahlgaard, a driving force in the EMPTQM from the Aarhus School of Business and Rick worked together to begin to build a Trans-Atlantic link. This link was endorsed at the April 1998 when the Academic Board of the EMPTQM, chaired by Professor Dahlgaard, then president of the EMPTQM Academic Advisory Board, EMPTQM President Kostas Dervitsiotis of Piraeus University in Greece, and two representatives of what has since become MAAOE - Søren Bisgaard, then of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Douglas Hensler of the University of Colorado at Boulder - met in Rome, Italy at the annual meeting of the EFQM.

Though the initial thrust of the November 1998 meeting wherein MAAOE was founded was to form a "North American Alliance" to interface with the EMPTQM, MAAOE's formation has rendered this link more nearly global than Trans-Atlantic. Information concerning the birth, vision, strategic intents, goals, objectives and framers of the Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence follows.

The formation of the Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence in November 1998 came as a coalescence of multiple forces including globalization of the economy, general concerns about quality and its role in the academy, and the emergence of business and performance excellence as a key descriptor of that which international quality prizes recognize and organizations of all sorts seek. Concerns, questions and musings specific to the quality movement included:

• Has quality over-promised and under-delivered?
• There has been a flight from 'quality' to 'excellence' as evidenced by a recent change in name from the Irish Quality Association to Excellence Ireland (5); the increasing prominence of and visibility of 'Criteria for Performance Excellence' with visual emphasis on integrity, accomplishment and competitiveness in America's Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Program (6), the mammoth effort invested in EFQM's 'Improved' Model for Business Excellence (7), the clear naming of Canada's national 'quality' award program as the Canada Awards for Excellence (8) and the emergence of new journals such as Measuring Business Excellence and UK Excellence. Do these developments reflect 'real' change, or simply 'change the name and do the same'?
• A fundamental change is needed - employing research based, evidence based, knowledge based, and theory based approaches, rather than presenting 'it' as a panacea for all ills in the private sector, public sector and voluntary sector without a coherent and agreed upon view of exactly what 'it' is.
• Is quality management a discipline area or an integration of a 'multiplicity of disciplines' - as reflected in the MAAOE genesis meeting attendance?
• Are there analogues with the emergence of other disciplines (e.g. engineering or economics) - do we have the 'kernel' or 'pupa stage' 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', in a manner not altogether dissimilar from the havoc wrought by 'the crusades' and 'sectarianism'?
• 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 the complexity?
• The role of academia in the fray is also under scrutiny with academic pursuit of quality frequently divorced from its practical implementation. Questions and issues raised here include:
• A widely acknowledged absence of a theoretical base that integrates the contributions to quality management of many disciplines.
• Though the phrase 'quality management' is often used, there is lack of general agreement concerning its definition.
• Given this lack of general agreement, there is consequent difficulty interpreting phrases in the literature such as 'companies that have implemented a TQM program'. Such phrases have the capacity to have as many meanings as there are authors. What are the consequent implications for 'comparative' and statistically based studies?
• Quality management academics often work in isolation from their 'disciplinary home' and lack the interaction with their peers that facilitates debate, development and discipline formation.
• One consequence of this isolation is less recognition for such academics compared to those with a similar 'academic activity level' working in their 'home discipline'. While this is less an issue in Europe than elsewhere around the globe, the academic existing in such an environment often experiences discouragement and disillusionment.

Concerns related to the quality experience in Australia are also instructive. While some of these are 'Australia specific', the majority apply globally.

• Quality has largely been neglected by the academic community with a consequent lack of rigorous research.
• American and European ideas and approaches have been imported, but without regard for 'cultural differences'.
• There has been no real admission or acknowledgement of 'failure' and, hence no real research into the root causes of 'failure' and their elimination or diminishment of their future effects.
• There has been a preponderance of disparate groups of consultants, each with a 'bag of tools' that are used as if approaches and solutions are not 'context dependent'.
• Internecine warfare exists between groups purporting to 'promote' quality. Factionalism creating confusion and ultimately disrepute among those who could potentially benefit from the quality message
• A perception exists that Australia holds a leadership position in some areas and trails well behind in others. Unfortunately, there is a failure to recognize which is which.

• ".the premier interdisciplinary organization driving organizational excellence through creation, dissemination, and application of knowledge."

• ".as responsible colleagues of the world to create a vehicle by which we make a difference by influencing organizations' performance as they seek to achieve excellence in order to improve conditions for the people of the world.  We will achieve this by utilizing a holistic view, systemic approach, and valuing our own continual learning."

Organizational excellence is an emerging field, implying that 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.  Motivating this desire, individually and as an organization, is the commitment by the founders of MAAOE to attain the personal and professional fulfillment that result from making a meaningful contribution to society as a mutually agreed upon expression of Covey's concept of leaving a legacy (9). It should not be surprising then, that MAAOE's goals and strategic intents ultimately map to the shaping of this legacy. MAAOE's goals are:

• 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.

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. This focus is expressed via three 'strategic intents' as follow.

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

• Encourage the creation of theory and applied interdisciplinary research.
• Identify creative ideas from current organizational practice for the study and dissemination of effective, ineffective and missing practices.
• Foster the development of professional learning and development for new and experienced researchers and practitioners concerned with organizational excellence.

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

• 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.
• To develop and manage vehicles to communicate knowledge of organizational excellence to scholars, practitioners, students, and other users in a usable form.

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

• 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.
• Provide professional learning and development experiences related to operational excellence for executives, practitioners, and both new & experienced researchers.

• We must resolve whether, organizational excellence is an emergent discipline and, if so, how or if we can act as 'midwives' in the process?
• We must identify a means by which we are leaders in the development of organizational excellence theory.
• We must discourage factionalism and not indulge in it ourselves.
• If organizational excellence is to command academic respect, we must seek to have research and teaching in the area given appropriate recognition by exerting influence on peers in the community of scholars as the opportunity arises by being proactive in that community.
• We must effectively promote rigorous academic research into organizational excellence.
• We must acknowledge and identify the existence of failure and resolve to research and publish failure as well as success, believing that benefit accrues from knowing what does not work just as surely as it does from knowing what does work.

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. In addition to being 'multinational', MAAOE is also 'multidisciplinary' in the sense 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 disciplines represented are: accounting; continuous quality improvement; economics; finance; human resources development; industrial and systems engineering; information technology; leadership & ethics; management; marketing; operations management; organizational behavior and statistics.

Attending the November 1998 founding meeting of MAAOE were the following individuals: Bovas Abraham (University of Waterloo - Canada), Joe Cannon (Colorado State University), Robert Cardy (Arizona State University), Laurel Cardy (Arizona State University), Smiley Cheng (University of Manitoba - Canada), Dan Costello (Colorado State University), John Dalrymple (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology - Australia), William Daughton (University of Colorado), George Easton (Emory University), Rick Edgeman (Colorado State University), O.C. Ferrell (Colorado State University), Gary Geroy (Colorado State University), Jose Luis Guerrero-Cusumano (Georgetown University), Doug Hensler (University of Colorado), Steve Hillmer (University of Kansas), John Hoxmeier (Colorado State University), Faizul Huq (University of Texas at Arlington), Stephen Jaros (Southern University), Dennis Karney (University of Kansas), Steve Lawrence (University of Colorado), Russell Lenth (University of Iowa), Jeffrey Luftig (University of Colorado), William Parr (University of Tennessee), Herbert Vessel (Southern University), Joseph Williams (Colorado State University), and Ashagre Yigletu (Southern University).

This list identifies only those who were able to participate on-site. Other founding members of MAAOE who were unable to attend are Bo Bergman (Linköping University of Technology, Sweden), Søren Bisgaard (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland), Alan Brown (Edith Cowan University, Australia), Mike Cox (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne University, England), Enrique del Castillo (Pennsylvania State University), Eileen Drew (Trinity College - Dublin, Ireland), Mark Finster (University of Wisconsin), Kevin Foley (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia), Peter Harvey (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia),  Philippe Hermel (Université de Versailles St Quentin-en-Yvelines, France), Robert V. Hogg (University of Iowa), Karen Kafadar (University of Colorado at Denver), Dennis K.J. Lin (Pennsylvania State University), Miguel Laguna (University of Colorado), Ajay Menon (Colorado State University), Douglas C. Montgomery (Arizona State University), J. Keith Ord (Pennsylvania State University), Arthur Preston (Queensland University of Technology, Australia), Robert Raeside (Napier University, Scotland), Sabah Randhawa (Oregon State University), Amrik Sohal (Monash University, Australia), Milé Terziovski (Monash University, Australia), William Woodall (University of Alabama), and C.F. Jeff Wu (University of Michigan). We fully expect participation in the Multinational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence to increase as we make progress in those areas represented by our strategic intents and as general awareness of the organization increases. Additional information concerning is available at the MAAOE website (10).

The November 1998 Multnational Alliance for the Advancement of Organizational Excellence founding meeting in Fort Collins, Colorado received corporate financial support from FEDEX Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Corporation, and Merrill Lynch. Colorado State University provided support at varying levels through the Office of the Vice President for Research and Information Technology, the College of Business, Computer Information Systems Department, the SABER Institute for Self-Assessment & Business Excellence Research, the Department of Statistics, and the Athletic Department. The University of Colorado at Boulder provided support through its College of Engineering and Applied Science and its Lockheed Martin Engineering Management Program. Moreover, MAAOE owes a debt of encouragement by member faculty and institutions of the European Masters Programme in Total Quality Management.

1. 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, February 1999

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

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

4. European Organisation for Quality (1999). http://www.eoq.org/

5. Excellence Ireland (1999). http://www.excellence-ireland.ie

6. Baldrige National Quality Award Program (1999). United States Department of Commerce Technology Administration,
    Gaithersburg, Maryland.

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

8. Canadian National Quality Institute (1999). Canada Awards for Excellence. http://www.nqi.ca/

9. Covey, Stephen (1992). Seven Habits of Effective People. Doubleday, New York.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A new professional organization was birthed at Colorado State University in November 1998. 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, "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." 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.