Isn 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.
