Frequently asked questions

What is the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award?
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award was established in 1987 and has become the most respected standard for performance excellence among US companies and as a model for businesses world-wide.

The award is named after Malcolm Baldrige, who served as the United States Secretary of Commerce under President Reagan.

During his tenure, Baldrige played a major role in developing and carrying out administration trade policy. The award was established as an annual national quality award under Public Law 100-107, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act, signed by President Reagan on August 20, 1987.

The purpose of the award is to promote awareness of quality and excellence, to recognize quality achievements of US companies and to publicize successful quality strategies.

The Secretary of Commerce and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) were given responsibilities to develop and administer the award with cooperation and financial support from the private sector. Awards are given annually in three categories: manufacturing companies, service companies and small businesses.

http://www.apqc.org/best/qual/qualityawards.htm


What are the major accomplishments of the Baldrige program?
  • It has created a de facto national standard for performance excellence,
  • produced national business role models,
  • spawned a network of derivative awards programs,
  • raised the competitiveness of US firms,
  • and established an effective information transfer mechanism, an excellence lingua franca, as well as a community of Baldrige organisations.
Source - http://www.quality.nist.gov.


Isn't 'Baldrige' just another name for bureaucracy?
No. The Baldrige approach is customer and data-driven, and process-obsessed, but only because that's how successful organisations behave. The published criteria represent validated best practice – widely accepted principles and practices that have been shown to work in the real world.

Newcomers to performance excellence may find the obsession with process improvement and management by fact somewhat daunting, and initial 'Baldrige' assessments, which nearly always produce results much worse than people expect, often cause an ego crash and precipitate a fair bit of blaming of the process. "Bureaucratic!" is one of the cuss-words that sometimes comes echoing down from the executive suite, but it's mostly a case of shooting the messenger.

Is there a secret Baldrige code? Or, 'what are they really asking for here?'
There's no secret code, and no need to read between the lines to wrinkle out what the criteria are 'really after.' Examiners use the same words to judge your application that you use to write it. 'They' are asking for exactly what the words say!

However (aha, here's the 'but'), it's a common mistake, especially by first-timers and entry-level users of the criteria, to misunderstand the questions, and/or to provide answers that don't address the questions.

Looking at what Baldrige winning organisations say in their applications (as published in their data sheets and application summaries) is the best guide to what the examiners are after. Using our worksheets and referring to our exhibits will help you make sure no stone is left unturned.

I'm a small business owner. How do I decide whether Baldrige is for me, and what can I expect to get out of it?
One of the strengths of the Baldrige approach is that it applies to organisations of all sizes, and all varieties. The entry-level New Zealand version of Baldrige (the Government and private sector co-sponsored Business Development Quality Awards) accepts applications from any organisations, regardless of size or purpose, and businesses as small as two people have done well in the past. The Dallas-based 1998 Baldrige small business winner, Texas Nameplate Company, has only about 66 people.

Whatever the size of your organisation, and whatever its function, you'll get value from Baldrige. You will have to make some judgments about how to apply the criteria, but don't use that as an excuse for ducking the hard questions!

In short, if you need to do better (and who doesn't in this fast-changing world?), and you want a structured, thorough, customer- and process-focussed approach that will provide validated, mainstream assistance, then Baldrige is worth a look.

And you don't need expensive help, DIY works just fine too.

I've decided I'd like to have a go, where and with what do I start?'

Here, with Baldrigeplus!

There are other resources as well, of course.
  • Point your internet browser to the National Institute of Standards and Technology site (www.nist.com) and get a copy of the most up-to-date Criteria for Performance Excellence application booklet. All of that material is right here as well, but you may need the application form, and it's free.
  • There are a number of books on the subject, several of them published by the American Society for Quality (ASQ) at www.asq.com.
  • Check your local state or national quality awards organisation. Almost all US states now have local awards, and many of them have user networks, applicant's workshops, self-help publications and conferences that feature local and national award winners. The Texas and Minnesota schemes are excellent examples, with lots of resource material. Go to www.apqc.org for a list.
  • You may have a local quality organisation (ASQ has local chapters throughout the US for example), where peer support will be available.
Just do it!

What about consultants?
If you believe you need the help of a consultant, then you probably do. If you are serious about entering a state or the national competition in the US, then you'll probably need some expert assistance. All three of last year's Baldrige winners did.

Before you do, visit our assessment and writing an application workshops.
  • Maybe you can do the job yourself - cheaper, better, with more opportunities to learn and with more permanent gains to be made, than you could with a consultant.
  • DIY may be right for you because it adds most value to the learning and improving benefits of a Baldrige assessment, and it self-trains internal experts or expert teams who can assess your on-going efforts.
  • In other words, DIY creates the sort of in-house expertise that consultants may not leave behind.
  • Use an external third-party assessor if appropriate, and lots of firms do, but note that in this writer's experience some 'Baldrige' consultants tend to score too highly, telling you you're better than you really are!
  • If you're not compiling an application for award-winning purposes, but to drive internal improvement, then the absolute numbers that your assessment throws up are less important than the relative numbers from year to year, or across different units of the organisation. In those circumstances internal assessment may be best.
What's the 'New Zealand perspective?'
New Zealand has a number of different 'excellence' awards. Some are industry-specific (the New Zealand Tourism Awards, for example), some are function-specific (Exporter of the Year, Executive of the Year …).

In the 'quality' area there's an entry-level award (the Business Development Quality Award) and there's the New Zealand Quality Award. Both are 'Baldrige' - using exactly the same criteria, and comparable examination processes.

Unlike Baldrige, however, the Business Development Quality Award in New Zealand is open to all organisations, regardless of size or purpose:
  • Past applicants have included hospitals, schools, child-care centres, animal-care centres, units of the core public service, and regulatory organisations (of the IRS variety). As well as the more usual manufacturers and service providers.
  • And some of the successful organisations have been quite small – like, two people!
That's the 'New Zealand' perspective. We're used to applying the criteria to a wide range of organisations, many of which would not qualify for the parent award in the US, and we're used to applying them to much smaller organisations. We're used to a government and private-sector mixture when administering an awards scheme, and we're used to running the whole thing on the smell of an oily rag!

We've learned that:
  • no organisation is so different that the criteria don't apply
  • there's real value in the Baldrige approach right down to the two-person show in its first years of business
  • there are barriers to entry that keep many potential applicants out of awards systems (and this site is one attempt to remedy that problem)
  • one way to increase participation is to provide applicant-training opportunities
  • the criteria are robust, transportable and flexible
  • it's very valuable, and a key 'marketing' tool, to keep in close touch with the parent organisation (the Baldrige team at NIST), and to use the published Baldrige criteria, word for word. The BDQA sends its winners to the US each year to visit US Baldrige winners, and BDQA examiners are trained each year by a senior Baldrige examiner (Paul Steel, visit him at www.bestprocess.com).
How does your site editor fit into this? My experience is as a six-year veteran examiner in the BDQA network, and this year (1999) I'm chairman of the national panel.
Dr Malcolm Macpherson


What about views like 'quality is not for us.' Or 'we don't need it' Meaning we're different, or we're good enough already; or worse, we set the standard?
One of the key lessons from the US economy, this past decade, has been that no-one sets or controls 'the standard.' Organisations which believe that they are already as good as it gets run the risk of 'excelling' in an economy that no-longer needs them.

There are plenty of examples. IBM in the early 1990s. Westinghouse. In 1960, one third of FORTUNE's top 25 companies, including Microsoft and Intel, didn't even exist (BusinessWeek, July 26th, 1999, p 8). Firms don't continually re-invent themselves, keeping ahead of the curve in an economy like that, by mistake.

The Baldrige criteria provide a robust, proven, widely used framework for success and long-term survival. Look at how a new-economy business like Solectron (the only two-time winner) uses Baldrige to replicate their performance excellence standards around the world, at new start-ups and in acquired businesses, to move quickly into profit, and to cement-in their critical-to-success common processes (see the case study).

And there's also plenty of evidence that the die-hards are finally getting it …here's an interesting, and maybe diagnostic vignette from FORTUNE magazine, January 11 1999, from an interview with Jack Welch, CEO of GE:

    FORTUNE: Jack, you're doing a total-quality thing ten or 15 years after the rest of corporate America did it. Why are you doing it, and why now?

    Welch: There was only one guy in the whole country who hated quality more than me. I always believed quality would come from just operating well and fast, and all these slogans were nonsense. The guy who hated quality more was Larry Bossidy. He hated quality totally. Then he left GE and went to Allied Signal. In order to resurrect Allied Signal, Larry went out, saw Motorola, and did some stuff on Six Sigma. And he called me one day and he said, 'Jack, this ain't b.s. - this is real stuff, this is really great stuff.'

    We poll 10,000 employees every year. In '95 they came back and said, we desperately need a quality issue. Six Sigma was something we adopted. The results are fantastic. We're going to get $1.2 billion of gain this year. For years our operating margin was never over ten. It's been improving, and it's going to be 16.7 this year. Our working-capital turns were four for 35 years. It will be nine this year.


Isn't 'Baldrige' just another passing fad.
Like TQM, or reengineering, or whatever?
No. For at least two reasons: First, Baldrige is not a tool or technique, it's a state of mind. It doesn't tell you what to do, it provides a methodology for assessing how well you're doing.

Second, Baldrige is world-wide public property, kept alive and continuously reinvented by a federal team at NIST, reinforced by the imprimatur of the President at the annual awards ceremony. There's an almost complete network of state awards in the US (the baby Baldriges) and an international Baldrige brigade.

Here's a quote that makes these points well. It's from Baldrige winner ADAC's website (ADAC Laboratories, Milpitas, CA).

"Awards are sometimes viewed as goals in themselves; the Baldrige award, however, is seen by ADAC executives as a means to an end. 'The driving force behind adopting the criteria was simply the desire to change and improve our company by implementing a new management system,' says Doug Keare, vice president of quality for ADAC. 'In the early 1990s, we concluded that relatively dramatic improvement was needed. We looked around for models and determined that the Baldrige criteria provided an appropriate road map for changing the company.'"

"The Baldrige criteria address key areas of business management — leadership, information and analysis, strategic planning, human resource development and management, process management, business results, and customer satisfaction. Implementing them did not exclude the use of any quality-oriented systems. The criteria actually promote adopting other quality techniques. As Keare says, 'The Baldrige criteria are nondenominational; there is no Baldrige guru.'"

As an aside, the so-called passing fads are frequently misunderstood by the people (usually business journalists) who so eagerly write them off. All are legitimate management tools, all are still widely used. Sure, the names may change, and organisations may adapt them for their own use, rebranding them in the process. But the key insights remain alive and well. Lots of organisations, for example, use Baldrige without using the B word, including some past winners (look at Raytheon and IBM Rochester in the case study collection for two examples).

Why get involved with Baldrige?
(Reason #9) Because the 'celebrity' is good for business.
Baldrige winners (and state award winners, and even those organisations which 'champion' the Baldrige approach) become community icons; visited, referred to, published in the business literature, and sought-after as employers. "Eighty five percent of financial analysts claimed they'd bought shares in a company because of the chief executive's reputation … celebrity bosses help to distinguish their companies from rivals by giving them a human face … and they can use their store of respect to help dig their companies out of a crisis. The companies run by the top 10 most-admired bosses recovered almost four times faster from the recent market correction than those run by the least-admired ones."
Harriet Rubin, Inc., March 1999