Alumni Capstone Interviews

Keith Everett
Chief Executive Officer, Hospice of Acadiana Inc.
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2021
How to Obtain a Deeper Understanding of a Culture of Belonging

With his 17 years of health care and quality improvement experience, Keith was well versed in putting patients and families first, which is why his capstone project to develop an equity, inclusion, diversity, and belonging organizational assessment for organizations to understand their cultures and surface issues of belonging became his passion. He took the Baldrige Excellence Framework® approach that could apply to any industry to produce a survey tool that any organization, large or small, could use. Read More

Charles Callahan, PhD, MBA, FACHE
President, Memorial Health System (MHS) Hospital Group and President and CEO, Memorial Medical Center
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2018
A Baldrige Fellow’s Insights on Advancing Health System Performance

My purpose for engaging in the Baldrige Executive Fellow Program was to advance personal and organizational high performance. I found it was humbling to acknowledge that there was no consistently accepted definition of “high performance” in our industry (Ahluwalia, et al, 2017). However, one cross-industry standard (i.e., the Baldrige Excellence Framework) offers clear guidance: “ever-higher levels of organizational and individual performance, including quality, productivity, innovation rate, and cycle time.” Read More

David Zaas, MD, MBA
President, Duke Raleigh Hospital
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2018
Journey to Target Zero 

David Zaas and his organization were already on a journey when he entered the Baldrige Executive Fellows Program. In alignment with Duke Health’s values of excellence in quality and safety, Duke Raleigh Hospital wanted to ensure that zero patients or team members suffered harm while receiving or providing care. As he entered the Fellows program, his commit-to-zero harm goal became his capstone project, and he was able to use all of the aspects of the fellowship to move toward this goal. Read More

Jo Ann Jenkins
CEO, AARP
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2012
AARP’s CEO Talks about Leadership (and the Value of Baldrige)

Jo Ann Jenkins was recognized by Fortune magazine this year as one of the world’s greatest leaders. Undoubtedly, members of her cohort of Baldrige Executive Fellows who gained new insights from learning from and with Jenkins were pleased for her (and not surprised). As Jenkins shared recently, “My interactions with other Baldrige Fellows have consistently been enlightening, inspiring, and illuminating.” Read More

Michael Suk, MD, JD, MPH, MBA, FACS
Chief Physician Officer and Chair of the Musculoskeletal Institute and Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Geisinger Health System
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2016
A Clinical Institute is Born: Integration to Improve Care Delivery

When Dr. Michael Suk entered into the Baldrige Executive Fellows Program, he designed his capstone project around trying to establish a Musculoskeletal Institute by using the tools around performance excellence to really set the foundation for going forward. Now they are well on their way to having achieved many of the goals that they set out. Read More

Veronica Muzquiz Edwards, DBA
CEO, InGenesis
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2018
The Baldrige Fellow Who’s 1 of "50 Most Powerful" Latinas in Corporate America

When Dr. Veronica Muzquiz Edwards, CEO of InGenesis and a Baldrige Fellow, was recently asked if she feels pressure to be a role model after being named by Fortune as one of the “Top 50 Most Powerful Latina Women in Corporate America,” her answer was “no.” As she recently explained in an interview for this blog, “such honors make it possible for everyone to see what can be obtained by women and Latinos in the business world.” Read More

Susan A. Stuart, RN, MPM
President and CEO, Center for Organ Recovery & Education (CORE)
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2016
A Project to Save and Enhance Lives Through Excellence

One of 58 federally designated, nonprofit OPOs in the United States; CORE serves areas of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Stuart recently completed a year-long executive development experience with the Baldrige Executive Fellows. As part of the fellowship, and with the support of the other executive fellows and Baldrige staff, she completed a capstone project of strategic significance and benefit for her own organization and for the many Americans waiting for life-saving transplants. Read More

Jeffrey Sedlack, MD
Medical Director, Providence Alaska Medical Center
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2015
A Baldrige Fellow Who Transformed His Hospital's OR Workforce

Like peer executives in the cross-sector leadership development program, he has since applied knowledge Dr. Jeffrey Sedlack gained from exchanges with senior leaders of national role-model organizations to boost the performance of his own organization. In particular, the capstone project of his Baldrige fellowship has driven improvements in the functioning of his health care organization. In the following interview, Sedlack shares details of that project and his views of the value of the Baldrige framework for health care and other organizations. Read More

Eric Moll, MBA, CPA
Chief Executive Officer, Mason General Hospital & Family of Clinics
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2015
Engaging Physicians in Changing Organizations: A Baldrige Fellow's Systems Approach

As a U.S. health care executive, Eric Moll has observed firsthand what he describes as the “massive shifts in health care delivery and payment” occurring throughout the nation in recent years. When Moll became a Baldrige Fellow, he had already gained insights on organizational change through use of process improvement methods. Moll applied some of his learning to aim his capstone project to establish “a systems approach to engage physicians in helping Mason General Hospital & Family of Clinics achieve our mission and vision.” Read more 

Brett A. Simon, MD, PhD
Director, Josie Robertson Surgery Center (JRSC), Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Cancer Center
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2015
A Doctor Who Launched an Innovative Surgery Center during His Baldrige Fellowship

I was just about to move to a new position when I started the Baldrige Executive Fellows Program, so my capstone was essentially my new job! Since my job was essentially to build out this new organization from the ground up, learning about and visiting high-performing organizations provided amazing insights and examples that were literally “just in time” for my work. My capstone then became three of the elements of building this organization: (1) articulating the goals and vision; (2) recruiting the “right” workforce; and (3) defining the priorities for management systems and data collection to support a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement. Read More

Cindy Bo, MBA
Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer for Nemours Children’s Health System
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2016
Leveraging Baldrige to Build a Value-Based Services Organization

For Cindy Bo, strategic results improvement meant helping her organization move to a value-based care model that centers on patient outcomes and improving the quality of care based on specific measures. Such a value-based care model focuses on quality over quantity, moving away from a traditional fee-for-service model. Read More

Timothy Mottet, EdD
President, Colorado State University–Pueblo
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2016
A Baldrige Fellow’s Plan to Make University Degrees More Valuable

The capstone project Mottet developed is likely to benefit students for years to come. In implementing the project, Mottet laid the groundwork to ensure that the university’s curriculum, as well as wide-ranging co-curricular activities, map to the current and future workforce needs identified by potential employers—with the ultimate aim of increasing the value of a college degree. Read More

Julie M. Kapp, MPH, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Health Management and Informatics, University of Missouri School of Medicine
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2014
Bringing a Systems Approach to U.S. Population Health

The publication A Conceptual Framework for a Systems-Thinking Approach to U.S. Population Health was inspired by the work I have done up to this point in my career within the health care sector, as well as within the education sector and with community-based organizations. In my past role, I served as the executive director of the Partnership for Evaluation, Assessment, and Research at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Our proposed framework would improve how we monitor and manage health for the U.S. population. Read More

Richard O. Davis, PhD, EdM.
President, Sibley Memorial Hospital
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2013
First-of-Its-Kind Innovation Hub Envisions—and Prototypes—the Future of Health Care

Where would you go in your organization if you had a really great idea? And what if you had access to a physical space where you could brainstorm with other staff members who might be part of deploying the idea, with patients or other customers who might be impacted by the idea, with your leadership who could guide the idea, and with coaches who could help you develop and even create a prototype that embodies the idea? Read More

Steffani Webb, MBA
Vice Chancellor for Administration, University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC)
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2014
Boosting Workforce Engagement (from the Bottom Up)

We sometimes hear of organizations adopting the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence in relatively limited ways to improve performance. They may start by just adopting core concepts and values behind the Baldrige framework. They may conduct a self-assessment with their employees in just a few categories of the Baldrige Criteria. They may be able to do these things, at least initially, in only one department. They may not yet have buy-in from their organization’s senior leadership. Read More

Steven J. Kravet, MD, MBA, FACP
Head of Johns Hopkins Community Physicians
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2014
A Baldrige Fellow Engages Employees via a “Galactic Communication Strategy”

Since attending the Baldrige Fellows program, some specific work that’s been under way is about enhancing the patient experience. We’ve worked on some principles of service excellence and employee engagement learned from the Ritz-Carlton and from K&N Management—two Baldrige Award winners to which I was exposed through the Baldrige Fellows program. We’ve enhanced our communications strategy—that was my capstone project—which is in some ways similar to what the Ritz-Carlton program is all about. Read More

Rand Jerris, PhD
Senior Managing Director, Public Services, United States Golf Association
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2013
Creating an Organizational Scorecard for the United States Golf Association

Created in 1894, the United States Golf Association (USGA) is the governing body for golf in the United States and Mexico. Together with The R&A in St. Andrews, Scotland, we write and interpret the Rules of Golf for golfers around the world, including rules of play, equipment standards, and a code of amateur status. Since starting our journey in 2012, we’ve aligned our team behind a renewed mission statement. We’ve articulated our core values for the first time, with active participation by more than 200 members of our staff. We’ve identified, with clarity and purpose, our key customers and initiated key customer feedback mechanisms for all core programs. Most recently, we created and introduced a scorecard of organizational measures for the first time. Read More

Steven Sessions
Supplier Quality Director and Deputy, Quality Mission and Success, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control (MFC)
Boiling the Ocean: How a Manufacturer Leveraged the Criteria to Improve its Supply Chain

Sessions said that MFC was already working on strategies to address supply chain issues when his colleague came back from a Baldrige Executive Fellows session with the idea for a project that "was pretty startling to colleagues." John Varley's project focused on how to improve the entire DOD supply chain. Read More

Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD
Johns Hopkins Medicine
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2012
Inspiring Executives--On the Plant Floor and in Other Safe Spaces

A recent experience reminded me of the value of seeking ideas and inspiration from elsewhere. . . . I was among 15 executives from various fields who toured Cargill through a fellowship run by the [Baldrige Performance Excellence Program]. On a visit to Cargill Corn Milling, among the largest of the gigantic company’s 75 business units, I heard a story with unexpected parallels to health care. Read More

Dave Brucks
Executive Director, Seagate’s Functional Excellence program, Seagate Technology
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2013
Baldrige in Manufacturing Today: Seagate’s Story

Seagate will benefit from bringing some of the best practices and processes from high-performing organizations and applying them to the work at Seagate. We’ve used some of the best practices already, for example, in how we manage customer complaints. I was able to pen characteristics of good customer complaint processes from [Baldrige Award-winning] hospitals, restaurants, and other manufacturers. We created spreadsheets of Baldrige Award winners’ practices; and improvement teams throughout the organization use this information in their areas. Read More

Jo Ann Jenkins
Chief Operating Officer, AARP, Inc.
Baldrige Executive Fellow, 2012
Why and How AARP Uses the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence

As a Fellow, I was able to establish invaluable connections and garner insights into how other leading organizations—both private and public—are developing and implementing innovative, effective strategies in support of operational excellence and leadership development. In my current role as chief operating officer of AARP, I’ve been able to tap many of the other leaders in my cohort and draw on the diversity of perspectives and experiences they offer. Read More