By Saad Ghafoor, Dr Robin Mann, Dr Nigel Grigg and Sanjay Mathrani, Sep 2019.

The Centre for Organisational Excellence Research launched the project Excellence Without Border in July 2018. All the known Business Excellence (BE) custodians that had held a BE award between 2016-2019 were deemed eligible for participating in the project. From the 55 countries that met this condition, 26 countries participated with some countries having more one BE custodian participating. 10 countries also participated in validating the survey; improving its wording and language. This helped to make the terminologies more relevant to the different participants for example the ones that follow EFQM based terminologies or MBNQA terminologies.

Business excellence custodians are the organisations that are responsible for carrying out business excellence related activities in their respective countries or regions.

The project intended to answer the following questions: –

1. How do business excellence custodians design business excellence frameworks/ models?
2. How do business excellence custodians promote the use of business excellence in their countries?
3. How do business excellence custodians facilitate the use of business excellence in their countries?
4. How do business excellence custodians award and recognize business excellence in their countries?
5. What are the support structures for business excellence in different countries?
6. How do the business excellence custodians measure the success of their business excellence frameworks/ models?

29 BE custodians from 26 countries submitted their surveys and 13 of the participants also contributed in the form of interviews/ Skype discussions.

Once the responses from 29 BE custodians were compiled, the initial draft of the report was sent out to the GEM Council for approval. After approval, the draft was sent to the participants for internal validation. This version of the report was only for internal use by the project participants and not for public release.

From this version a second version was created for public release – the PUBLIC RELEASE VERSION, DOWNLOAD HERE, shows aggregated responses and excludes the names/ indications of the participants.

Future Research

Further to the EWB project, the participants that were interested in involving business excellence assessors were also provided with another survey specially designed for business excellence assessors. Preliminary results from that survey were shared with the participating countries. An additional survey for organisations that are on the business excellence journey is now underway – if you represent one of these organisations and would like to participate in this research please click here

For further information contact:

Saad Ghafoor
PhD Researcher for Excellence Without Borders
Centre for Organisational Excellence Research
Massey University, New Zealand
S.G.Ghafoor@massey.ac.nz