Isn 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 relativ
