Every year, the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program awards up to eighteen public or private United States organizations. The name of the award is the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and it is administered to organizations in the business, healthcare, education, and nonprofit sectors for performance excellence. Each award is given by the President of the United States and awarded to organizations across six categories of eligibility including manufacturing, service, small business, education, health care, and nonprofit. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is named after the former United States Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige. He served in this position from 1981 until 1987, when Baldrige death in a rodeo accident. During his tenure, he was a strong supporter of quality management and believed that it was imperative to United States wealth and sustainability. Because of this interest, Congress named the award after him. The award was created in response to the leaders of America finally realizing that quality was a key component in the worldwide arena of business and competiveness. The purpose of the award, which came to be as a result of the 1987 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act, was to promote awareness of performance excellence in regards to competitiveness in U.S. business. Since its inception in 1987, the award has expanded to include health care, education, nonprofit, and government organizations. In addition to increasing performance excellence awareness, the award also exists to identify and recognize role-model businesses, establish criteria for measuring improvement efforts, and circulate and share best practices. It clearly states what the criteria for being recognized as a leader in these categories should be and encourages the sharing of successful performance strategies and benefits received from these methods amongst organizations. It is important to note that the award is not given specifically for products and services, but rather it is given to organizations that show continuous improvement in delivering products or services. While there are technically different sets of criteria for the different sectors of performance excellence, they all seem to quite similar in terms of what they are analyzing. The first bit of criteria is the organizational profile. This area is looked upon to get a feel for how your group is set up and what kind of environment is established there. It allows the examiners to understand your organization, core competencies, relationships, competitors, and strategic challenges you may face. The next category of criteria is Leadership. Here, examiners look to see the role of your senior leaders and what sort of responsibilities within the group and society. For example, they will examine the group’s legal compliance, public concerns of the group and community support. It is particularly important for organizations to have a good public image and be active in the community in order to receive this award. The second category is Strategic Planning. Baldrige criteria keys in on three areas of customer-driven excellence, operational performance improvement and innovation and organizational and personal learning in terms of strategic planning. In addition to these three factors, examiners will look at strategy development and implementation to gauge how well your organization sets goals and how efficiently you achieve them. The next segment of criteria is Customer Focus. This area refers to how often you listen to the customer and take their needs and concerns into consideration when planning for the future in addition to creating new products or services that are applicable to different markets and customers. There are so many ways to interact with the customers and the examiners will be looking to see if you take advantage of all of them. The fourth bit of criteria is Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management. This is what the Baldrige Criteria refers to as the “brain center” because where the alignment of your organization’s operations with strategic plans. This area ultimately refers to the information about your organization and relates them to quality, improvement, innovation, and competitiveness. It measures and analyzes performance to estimate competitive advantages and productivity growth. The fifth category is Workforce Focus. This area refers to the ability of the organization to have a strong and healthy work environment in addition to being able to engage the workforce and have them continue to stay productive and happy during times of change or adaptation. The sixth section of criteria is Operations Focus. This area focuses on how well the organization can operate in its area of work and the operational effectiveness of the group to achieve success and sustainability. This essentially means that it analyzes the work processes to see how you create value for customers and whether or not you have a healthy and safe workplace environment in which you can deliver value to the customers. The final area of the criteria is Results. This area looks at the results of many different sub-regions. These sub-regions are product and process, customer-focused, workforce-focused, leadership and governance, and financial and market. The examiners will utilize this category to provide all of the results necessary to nourishing an enterprise. All of the criteria listed are very important to realizing the final goal of becoming an award winner, and it is important for organizations looking to apply to ensure that they are meeting most of the criteria so that they have a chance of winning the Baldrige Award and aren’t just wasting money on the application fee. Prior to 2011, there had been ninety different organizations who had received the Baldrige Award. In 2012, there were four more organizations added to this list. These four groups were Lockheed Missiles and Fire Control, MESA Products, Inc., North Mississippi Health Services, and the City of Irving, Texas. All of these organizations were among different categories. Lockheed Missiles and Fire Control was a part of the manufacturing area, MESA was a part of the small business area, North Mississippi Health Services were a part of the health care area, and the City of Irving, Texas was a part of the nonprofit sector. While it just so happened that this past year all of the recipients were from different categories, this is not always the case. For example, last year, three different organizations were awarded in the health care category. The 2011 class of recipients were the Henry Ford Health System (health care), the Schneck Medical Center (health care), the Southcentral Foundation (health care) and the Concordia Publishing House (nonprofit). There have been 94 recipients to date and it appears that more than a couple of organizations have been awarded this more than once, including MESA Products, Inc. This proves that they must be very deserving winners and very capable in terms of performance excellence and quality. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is not just given to any organization meets most or all of the criteria listed as important by the Baldrige Program. Each winner has to apply for the award and pay the application fee. Despite this fee, many people feel that the application is well worth the money, as the examiners put each applicant through a thorough assessment of an organization’s internal improvement process. Arnold Weimerskirch, Vice President of Honeywell, Inc. and former Chair of the Baldrige Award Panel of Judges, feels that “the application and review process for the award is the best, most cost-effective, and comprehensive business health audit you can get.” This makes sense, as a minimum of three hundred hours are spent reviewing each application and site-visited applicants are given more than one thousand hours of review. The feedback that is given from these reviews must certainly be worth the money that it costs to apply. That being said, it is not difficult to apply either. It is essentially a two step process. You first need to submit an eligibility certification package and then an award application package. The eligibility certification package consists of a completed eligibility certification form that is signed by the organization’s highest ranking official, an organization chart and other required documents described in the form, the fee of three hundred and sixty dollars, and proof of the date you sent the packet. This material is kept confidential by the Baldrige Program and this eligibility package is generally the first thing looked at by the examiners. The Award Application Package is made up of the award application form, fifteen individual paper copies of your application and required supplemental sections along with a CD containing a PDF file of the application, the fee that is appropriate for your organization, and proof of the date that you sent the package. This application can only be accepted if the organization had certified the eligibility by the due date that is listed on the Baldrige Program’s website. If at any time the Baldrige Program determines that the organization is ineligible or the application is incomplete, the applications may be returned and the award can obviously not be given to that particular organization. Because the Baldrige Performance Excellence program depends on a large number of examiners, they encourage many people to apply to become examiners for them. They have a few main factors that they look at when determining who of the applicants might become an examiner. These factors are U.S. citizenship, expertise in the Baldrige criteria categories, in-depth experience in several sectors or a high-need area, knowledge, skills, and abilities. The first bit of criteria is that each examiner must be a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident of the United States. Secondly, they look to see if you have any expertise I one of their seven criteria categories, such as customer focus or operations focus. If you are particularly skilled in one of these areas it will significantly help your potential examiner status. The third aspect is that they will look to see if you have comprehensive knowledge or experience in multiple sectors (ex: nonprofit, education, health care) or if you have expertise in a high need area such as physicians, or senior leaders. How you obtain this high level of expertise can range from official studies or articles you may have written or job experience. In addition to those pieces of criteria, they also consider knowledge and skills in many areas, including leadership, strategic planning, customer service, oral and written communication, and interpersonal communication. Should you apply to become an examiner and be appointed to the Baldrige Board of Examiners, you can expect to attend one of the top ten government leadership excellence programs in the nation. You will work as a member of a team of examiners in a review of an applicant’s organization and possibly even take part in an on-site analysis. Becoming an examiner is certainly a timely commitment. Examiners typically have to give one hundred and forty five hours of training between the months of April and August, and possibly another one hundred and fifty hours if you are chosen to be a part of an on-site visit. However, you are bestowed with the honor of representing the Baldrige Program and for performance excellence. This is something that many examiners take great pride in and so should any new examiners. In conclusion, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is a great tool to not only recognize the great organizations that really excel in certain areas, but to also give a model example of performance excellence. One thing that I found interesting was that many states and local areas have awards similar to the Baldrige Award to promote the use of the criteria and share the winning ways of prior award recipients. This just shows how an award like this is really helpful for developing organizations and can be used as a tool in addition to an award.