Striving for excellence: Indiana examples of innovation, leadership and entrepreneurial spirit.

• Author: Dickman, Ted
• Position: Viewpoint

A COUPLE OF MONTHS ago, BKD and Indiana Business magazine recognized six Indiana businesses for achieving business performance excellence. That certainly sounds good and seems like a lofty accomplishment. And indeed it is. But what is it that they achieved and why did they receive these awards?

The dictionary defnition of excellence is the state, quality or condition of excelling; doing something well and with a high degree of proficiency; superiority; first-class.

Whether it is in our personal or professional lives, excellence is something we all strive to achieve. I believe it stems from our internal competitive nature to be the best and is directly coupled with our own self-image. In business, excellence can take on many forms. It can be achieved through providing superior customer service or producing the highest-quality product in a marketplace.

In the context of this awards program, these businesses did the best job of demonstrating their commitment to business excellence through the improvement of a product, service or business practice and the positive impact it has on the organization and the state of Indiana.

Nobody starts off being excellent. It takes hard work and time to refine your business practices, processes, products and services to reach your goals. Additionally, excellence isn't a state of being. It's a never-ending journey to improve your performance. So, improvement, or simply getting better at what you do, is a critical component of this program and of business in general.

And indeed, the winners of this year's awards exemplify these concepts. Take Walker Information, Gold winner in the technology category, as an example. Walker has been a beacon of business success in Indiana for a long time. Just in the last few years, however, the company decided to completely overhaul its operations, moving from paper-based to Internet-based processes. Why? Its systems weren't broken. Yet the change reduced overhead, improved efficiency and eliminated delays between data collection and reporting. Perhaps more important, Walker more than doubled the number of surveys it conducted last year alone.

Improvements like these yield excellence. But it doesn't happen by accident. That's why this awards program is designed to ask questions that root out the methodology an organization uses to reach its goals. Good planning and...