Excellence – A look back and ahead
In focus: Austria as part of Europe
On June 4, 2025, the Austrian Quality Award will be presented for the 30th time. Our Managing Director Franz Peter Walder has been involved from the very beginning, was a founding member of the non-profit AFQM (Austrian Foundation for Quality Management) and is on the board of Quality Austria, which organizes the State Prize together with the Ministry for Economic Affairs, Energy and Tourism.
Why is the ambition to become excellent meaningful and important for every organization right now? Why does excellence strengthen the small craft business just as much as the energy supplier or the administrative institution, the large industrial company or the non-profit social or healthcare institution?
Several skills and characteristics make up excellence in organizations:
- For example, we need robustness and resilience when dealing with the unexpected, with challenges and with the required speed of decision-making and action.
- Motivated by optimism and a positive view of human nature, it is more enjoyable to realize goals with consistency, perseverance and consistency.
- Robust people move and shape organizations, follow directions consistently and react quickly and flexibly to changing conditions.
We shape our own future
Unfortunately, the current media reality predominantly conveys dramatic events. Good events are hardly ever reported – the media always act according to the principle: “Bad news is good news for the media business”. We should not lose heart over this – consciously and unconsciously, we are constantly deciding how we want to deal with what is happening: with fear or with curiosity. Fear of the future or worries about future generations reduce our creativity and energy.
The excellent approach: “A desire for the future”!
Let us remember previous generations who, after war-related destruction, always looked to the future with hope and achieved incredible things and created something valuable. In comparison, our current challenges are easily manageable. Excellent organizations are characterized by confidence, and this is how they succeed in mastering complexity.
Future viability with the Excellence Framework Europe EFE
On the occasion of the thirtieth implementation of the
There have been further developments since the award was presented: for the first time, the evaluation was based on the Excellence Framework Europe.
Franz Peter Walder, co-author of this open-model, holistic and free framework, summarizes: “All well-founded management approaches have similar principles and approaches in common. Success research shows that excellent organizations use comparable levers. The future-oriented framework consolidates this content.”