【正文】 and (6) enhancing your anization’s performance in fulfilling its societal responsibilities and its service to your munity as a good citizen. Employees’ success depends increasingly on having opportunities for personal learning and practicing new skills. Organizations invest in employees’ personal learning through education, training, and other opportunities for continuing growth. Such opportunities might include job rotation and increased pay for demonstrated knowledge and skills. Onthejob training offers a costeffective way to train and to better link training to your anizational needs and priorities. Education and training programs may benefit from advanced technologies, such as puter and Interbased learning and satellite broadcasts. Personal learning can result in (1) more satisfied and versatile employees who stay with your anization, (2) anizational crossfunctional learning, (3) building the knowledge assets of your anization, and (4) an improved environment for innovation. Thus, learning is directed not only toward better products and services but also toward being more responsive, adaptive, innovative, and efficient—giving your anization marketplace sustainability and performance advantages and giving your employees satisfaction and motivation to excel. Valuing Employees and Partners An anization’s success depends increasingly on the diverse knowledge, skills, creativity, and motivation of all its employees and partners. Valuing employees means mitting to their satisfaction, development, and wellbeing. Increasingly, this involves more flexible, highperformance work practices tailored to employees with diverse workplace and home life needs. Major challenges in the area of valuing employees include (1) demonstrating your leaders’ mitment to your employees’ success, (2) recognition that goes beyond the regular pensation system, (3) development and progression within your anization, (4) sharing your anization’s knowledge so your employees can better serve your customers and contribute to achieving your strategic objectives, and (5) creating an environment that encourages risk taking and innovation. Organizations need to build internal and external partnerships to better acplish overall goals. Internal partnerships might include labormanagement cooperation, such as agreements with unions. Partnerships with employees might entail employee development, cross training, or new work anizations, such as highperformance work teams. Internal partnerships also might involve creating work relationships among your work units to improve flexibility, responsiveness, and knowledge sharing. External partnerships might be with customers, suppliers, and education anizations. Strategic partnerships or alliances are increasingly important kinds of external partnerships. Such partnerships might offer entry into new markets or a basis for new products or services. Also, partnerships might permit the blending of your anization’s core petencies or leadership capabilities with the plementary strengths and capabilities of partners. Successful internal and external partnerships develop longerterm objectives, thereby creating a basis for mutual investments and respect. Partners should address the key requirements for success, means for regular munication, approaches to evaluating progress, and means for adapting to changing conditions. In some cases, joint education and training could offer a costeffective method for employee development. Agility Success in globally petitive markets demands agility—a capacity for rapid change and flexibility. Ebusiness requires and enables more rapid, flexible, and customized responses. Businesses face evershorter cycles for the introduction of new/improved products and services, as well as for faster and more flexible response to customers. Major improvements in response time often require simplification of work units and processes and/or the ability for rapid changeover from one process to another. Crosstrained and empowered employees are vital assets in such a demanding environment. A major success factor in meeting petitive challenges is the designtointroduction (product or service initiation) or innovation cycle time. To meet the demands of rapidly changing global markets, anizations need to carry out stagetostage integration (such as concurrent engineering) of activities from research or concept to mercialization. All aspects of time performance now are more critical, and cycle time has bee a key process measure. Other important benefits can be derived from this focus on time。 (3) results in solving problems at their source (―root cause‖)。 the need to create value for customers and the business。 fax: (301) 9483716。 (3) reducing errors, defects, waste, and related costs。 parisons of operational, market, and petitive performance。D), customers’ input, best practice sharing, and benchmarking. Organizational learning can result in (1) enhancing value to customers through new and improved products and services。 and achieve strategic goals. How to begin that first Baldrige assessment? Take a few minutes and scan the questions in the Organizational Profile on pages 10–12. A discussion of the answers to these questions might be your first Baldrige assessment. For additional guidance, refer to our free booklet Getting Started with the Baldrige National Quality Program Criteria for Performance Excellence: A Guide to SelfAssessment and Action. If you are ready to take the full Baldrige challenge, you can perform a selfassessment as an internal improvement effort, or you can use your selfassessment as the basis for an Award application. Assessment against all seven Categories of the Criteria (see pages 13–29) allows you to identify strengths and to address opportunities for improving your processes and results. Do you need to