It’s Our Anniversary! 25 Reasons to Celebrate

Posted by Christine Schaefer

Twenty five years ago today—on August 20, 1987—Congress passed Public Law 100-107, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act of 1987. This legislation set the foundation for the Baldrige Award and Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. The charge was to identify and recognize role-model U.S. businesses, establish criteria for evaluating their improvement efforts, and disseminate and share their best practices. The aim was to help U.S. organizations, particularly manufacturers, improve their performance and competitiveness relative to others around the world, in order to benefit the nation’s economy.

As former President Ronald Reagan wrote that year:

The [Baldrige] Award salutes companies that improve the qualities of their goods and services, thus enhancing productivity, lowering costs, and increasing profitability. . . . They are the engines of growth, jobs, and prosperity in any society, along with the good management and attention to quality and customer needs that the [Baldrige] Award will promote.

The 25th anniversary of the founding of the Baldrige Award—which we are celebrating all year, culminating at the 25th annual Quest for Excellence® conference next April in Baltimore—is certainly not a private affair. Whether you work in the business, health care, education, or nonprofit sectors today, if you are a U.S. organization or citizen, you have plenty of good reasons to celebrate this anniversary as benefitting you. In fact, here are 25 ways that Congress’s establishing the Baldrige Award 25 years ago has added value to the U.S. economy:

1. Jobs created
2. Lives saved
3. Increased sales,profits, and market share
4. Rising reading and mathematics proficiency
5. Benefit-to-cost ratio of 820-to-1
6. Demonstrated return on investment
7. Cross-sector learning
8. Best-practice sharing
9. Large number of corporations, associations, and government programs basing internal assessments on Baldrige
10. Essential core values to world-class organizations
11. Systems perspective leading to maximized systems so more resources can be spent on saving lives, helping students learn, and generating sales or revenue
12. Continuous improvement and learning
13. National role models
14. Tremendous time and resources donated by volunteer sector experts
15. Increased customer satisfaction and engagement
16. Proven improvement and innovation framework
17. Value-added, cost-effective business assessments and feedback
18. Self-assessments
19. Focus on quality, innovation, and excellence
20. Improved cycle time (see page 24 of Baldrige 20/20)
21. Alignment of resources and processes that drive results
22. Regional consortiums and communities
23. Better ability to face health care reform
24. Workforce satisfaction and engagement
25. Outreach and education

How might you and your organization celebrate all this value? An obvious way is to take advantage of the Baldrige Program’s many tools for improving your organization’s performance. We also invite you to attend the 25th Anniversary Quest for Excellence conference in Baltimore, April 7-10, 2013; stay tuned for more details. Check out the letters of congratulations the Baldrige Program has received from U.S. and international organizations and leaders. And happy anniversary to us all!

The Baldrige flag is raised along with the U.S. flag outside NIST on August 20, 2012.

The Baldrige flag and U.S. flag fly at NIST on August 20, 2012.