Article written for www.annarborbusinessmagazine.com

The housing market appears to be on the mend. Sales are up, foreclosures are down, inventory has shrunk, interest rates are lower, and buyers are out looking for purchases.

While this is good news, some concerns still persist, particularly with hesitant home sellers and tighter loan qualifications for prospective home buyers. Sellers are tepid, not sure if now is the right time to sell. And a number of buyers are finding it difficult to get a loan, due to higher loan thresholds and increased attention to the process of verifying the supporting financial documents. Read more…

Here is a statistic that may surprise you: 1 in 10 people who are employed in the U.S. are employed by a nonprofit organization. The roughly 1.6 million registered nonprofits in the U.S. employ approximately 13.5 million people. As a comparison, this number is higher than the number of people employed in the entire U.S. finance sector, including insurance and real estate.

And while the organizations are nonprofits, they are certainly not non-revenue. With estimated total combined assets of $4.3 trillion, U.S. nonprofits have roughly $750 billion in annual revenue and account for approximately 5.5% of the total U.S. GDP. Add to this number the estimated $170 billion in annual value contributed by over 8.1 billion annual service hours provided by U.S. nonprofit volunteers and you see a nonprofit sector that contributes almost $1 trillion to the U.S. economy.
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Have you attended a Detroit Economic Club (DEC) meeting? Take this feedback survey to help shape future plans and initiatives of your DEC. Baker Strategy Group is a DEC Partner and is conducting this survey on behalf of the DEC.

Here’s a note from Steve Grigorian, COO of the DEC:

The Detroit Economic Club is committed to being a world-class organization and is
constantly looking for ways to add value and improve the quality of the club. To do that, we need to know what you think.

Please take a few minutes to respond to the following questions. Your feedback will be considered in future plans and initiatives of your Detroit Economic Club.

Follow this link to the Survey:
Take the Survey
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Does your company manufacture in Michigan?  Take our outlook survey.  Baker Strategy Group is partnering with Michigan Manufacturers Association (MMA) to conduct the 4th Annual Michigan Manufacturers Outlook Survey.

Here’s a note from Chuck Hadden, CEO of MMA:

It’s that time of year again — the time when we gather member input on programs and services to ensure that we are meeting our goal to service the needs of Michigan’s vital manufacturing sector.

The Michigan Manufacturing Survey will also help us identify your priorities for 2012 and measure your short- and long-term expectations for the industry. The data, and how it compares to the last three years, will be assessed and made available in a comprehensive report to be released in January.

The survey will take just a few minutes and will provide invaluable insight. Please share your opinions by clicking on the following link:
MMA Annual Outlook Survey.

Please forward this e-mail to others in your company or at other manufacturing firms, colleagues, suppliers and customers. The deadline for survey participation is Friday, December 2. Participants will receive a free summary of the survey results prior to the release of the full report.

Working together, we can do more for Michigan industry.

Sincerely,

Chuck Hadden
President and CEO
Michigan Manufacturers Association
517-487-8541
mma_executiveoffice@mma-net.org

This study draws on insights from the 2011 Thriving Schools program.  As part of the Thriving Schools program, this study looks specifically at feedback from parents of elementary school children who attended a Michigan public school in 2010-2011. The Thriving Schools program gath-ers feedback from various school stakeholders regarding their experience with the school.

Background

The Thriving Schools program began in 2006 with 1 private school in Ann Arbor. As part of a larger strategic planning effort, the school board conducted a survey to gather feedback from school stakeholders (parents, teachers, school board, etc.). This feedback was then incorporated into the school’s strategic planning process with great success. Since then, we have conducted this program for over 100 schools and gathered over 10,000 responses.
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Article written for www.annarborbusinessmagazine.com

It’s that time of year again. Company executives pull out the annual budget and begin planning next year’s budget. At its worst, the budgeting process is a tedious process that consumes a good deal of the company’s productive resources creating an updated version of last year’s document that will not be thoroughly reviewed again until the following year.

At its best, though, the budget—and the budgeting process—can be instrumental in crystalizing strategy and sharpening plans for operations and marketing. For the budget to work, say planning experts, it must be connected to the overall strategy and company plans.
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Article written for www.annarborbusinessmagazine.com

On July 1 of this year, Alison Davis-Blake became the new Edward J. Frey Dean of U-M Ross School of Business. Prior to her appointment, Davis-Blake was the dean of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, where she was the Investors in Leadership Distinguished Chair in Organizational Behavior. We recently had the chance to talk to Dean Davis-Blake about Ross and its unique approach to action-based learning.
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Starbucks in Ann Arbor has come up with a creative method for soliciting tips from customers. Instead of the standard tips container, customers are invited to make their voice heard by depositing change into one of two bins and, thereby, voting on the question of the day. The winning answer is the one with the most money at the end of the day.

This simple example highlights a few interesting insights. First, customers are conditioned to expect their voices to be heard in virtually all areas of daily life. Whether it’s choosing to “Like” something on Facebook or simply tossing change in a tip bin, people have grown accustomed to the myriad of source points designed to gather measurements.

Second, while it’s true that this innundation of surveys and feedback requests is overwhelming, people take time to give feedback if it’s easy and they care about the subject. A survey reqesting feedback on your experience with a ball point pen is not likely to garner much response. Our recent study requesting for input from parents about public schools, on the other hand, received terrific input because parents care about their child’s school.

Making the it easy–clicking a button or tossing coins in a jar–is the key to gathering customer feedback. Customers seldom resent you asking for their input. What they do resent, however, is you respect their time. That’s a tip we can all do well to remember.

Baker Strategy Group (BSG) completed a three-month engagement with the University of Michigan Health System (UMHS). BSG was hired to provide qualified market research and analytical services to the UMHS Corporate Quality Improvement group.

BSG’s work was coordinated by Ed Karls, Director of the Customer Performance Metrics and Improvement group within the UMHS Quality Improvement (QI) team led by Deb Guglielmo. As part of a 3-month engagement, David Baker of BSG worked with the QI team on delivering programs involving an employee engagement assessment, patient satisfaction studies, and a program measuring satisfaction among physicians who refer patients to UMHS.

“It’s a privilege to be engaged with a team dedicated to ensuring continuous improvement throughout UMHS,” says Baker. “The CEO of U-M Health System, Ora Hirsch Pescovitz, M.D., has emphasized in past presentations that the three core areas of research, education, and clinical medicine combine to form one integrated health system. From our experience, the QI group is in a unique position within the organization to help make ‘One UMHS’ happen.”

The work of the QI group spans across UMHS and some of its key stakeholders, notes Baker. “They send surveys to over 20,000 UMHS employees, gather feedback from a multitude of hospital and clinic patients, and solicit survey responses from referring physicians throughout the state and region. As such, the Quality Improvement group is well-situated as a cohesive force throughout UMHS. BSG is honored to have joined the QI team for this brief period and to help contribute to the QI team’s important role within UMHS.”

Baker Strategy Group (BSG) helps clients make SMART Customer Strategy happen. BSG bridges thought leadership with solid execution to ensure success. Client work is concentrated four main areas: China business development, advanced manufacturing, education, and non-profit organizations.

Article written for www.annarborbusinessmagazine.com

The University of Michigan is an economic powerhouse in the Ann Arbor area community, positively impacting hundreds of thousands of lives every year. With more than 30,000 employees and nineteen academic schools and colleges across three campuses (Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint), U-M engages over 40,000 students and hands out around 11,500 degrees each year.

A major driving force of the University’s impact and success is its vast array of research activity. Each year, U-M spends over $1 billion in research ($1.2 billion in fiscal 2010). In fact, U-M has the largest research portfolio in the country among all public universities.

Dr. Stephen R. Forrest is Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan and the William Gould Dow Collegiate Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Dr. Forrest’s role in the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) is to nurture and support excellence in research across the University by working with the deans and department chairs in supporting interdisciplinary research.

We had the chance to speak with Dr. Forrest on how research is coordinated at U-M and what the growing trend in public/private collaboration can mean for the location Ann Arbor area economy.
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