In the Spring of 2006, the Monfort Institute’s was established to create, manage, and disseminate knowledge for performance excellence.  The Institute is an integral part of the Monfort College of Business at the University of Northern Colorado located in Greeley, Colorado.  

The mission at the Institute is to enhance business education by creating, managing, and disseminating knowledge to help organizations of all types achieve, sustain, and continuously improve performance and create value for multiple stakeholders in a changing and increasingly global environment. To do this the Institute is currently focused on two broad areas – sustaining high performance in a changing world and taking the organization to the next level of ultra high performance. Why these two areas? These are the two most common questions asked by Baldrige award recipients including the Monfort College of Business. Over the past few decades we have observed many organizations that have achieved high levels of performance and then experienced one of three performance patterns. Some organizations have not sustained the gain and experienced a decline in performance. Some organizations have succeeded in maintaining the gain but for some reason do not continue to improve. Some organizations actually continue to improve and achieve even higher levels of performance. What are the differences that explain these three performance patterns? The Institute is working with many of the Baldrige recipients to answer these two questions.
 
The Institute builds “bridges” between high performing organizations (e.g., Baldrige recipients) and researchers from a variety of universities to address executive-driven questions facing high performing organizations of all types – business, healthcare, education, and non-profit. The Institute uses a five phase collaborative research process that incorporates the insights of executives at key milestones during the research project. This helps ensure the research process produces new insights that are important to the participants and can be applied in practice. The research “community” includes: Monfort faculty, Senior Research Fellows, doctoral students, and researchers conducting one-time research projects.

The Institute enhances undergraduate business education at the Monfort College of Business by teaching two classes on quality and performance excellence, contributing to curriculum, and sponsoring a lecture series focused on leadership and current topics in performance excellence. Each year two senior executives from high performing organizations come to Monfort to talk about key issues that executives face in creating and sustaining high performing organizations. In addition, each year two thought leaders also come to Monfort to discuss key issues facing organizations today and in the near future and present leading edge idea on how to address these issues. In addition, the Institute faculty teach two courses – one on Quality Management and one on Managing for Performance Excellence. This book is the main text for a senior level course on Managing for Performance Excellence.

The Institute also has a Process Design Studio that is a creative and collaborative approach to business and management process and system design.  This proven approach (methodology and framework) has been used to design and redesign a variety of processes and systems for a wide variety of organizations of all types and sizes. The design studio is particularly helpful for local organizations that are participating in the Colorado Performance Excellence and Baldrige National Quality award programs. The design studio helps organizations design and redesign their processes and systems to improve performance and create value for multiple stakeholders. The tools and techniques described in this book provide the basis for and enhance the design studio sessions.