All entries for Monday 03 October 2005

What is excellence?

Today i've been thinking about the concept of excellence. I find that I can't really explore something until i've attempted to define it. Understand more about it by attempting to define it. When studying the conept of entrepreneurship last year it was immediately obvious that there was no single definition of an entrepreneur or being entrepreneurial. In fact, most a lot of the literature that I studied were different viewpoints on what entrepreneurs were and who could be one. The point of the exercise was to point out that there was no definition and that people were still arguing about it today.

As a mathematician at heart (!) I like to define things; to understand a question thoroughly before answering and being precise in my answer. It is taking a little adjusting but I think i'm getting there. I'm feeling my way at the moment and i've found that it's hard to plan time when I haven't 'got the feel' of how deep to delve into a topic and how long that is going to take as i'm still getting to grips with the concept of a VLA and how to use it to get the most out of it.

This course is all about application so big debates about how to define excellence seem a little out of context. But that isn't to say that they don't have value. The criteria for an organisation to achieve excellence may be different depending on the type of organisation.

And this is where the EFQM excellence model comes in. It is a non-prescriptive model which gives scope for different levels of importance to enablers and results. After a quick inspection i'm not finding any real critique of the model in academic journals. Am I not looking hard enough?

Personal critique of EFQM excellence model to follow.

: 03 Oct 2005 13:58 |  Tags: Eee |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem