83 Vie for 2010 Baldrige Award
The Baldrige program reported yesterday that 83 organizations have applied for the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The breakdown of applicant categories is 54 in health care, 10 in education, 7 in nonprofit/government, 7 small businesses, 3 manufacturers, and 2 service companies.
As the graph shows, last year the health care category accounted for 60% of all applicants. This year it represents 65%. While health care is embracing the Baldrige model, businesses are snubbing it: Only 14.5% of the applicants came from the three business categories, down from 15.7% last year. The Baldrige program came into existence to make American businesses more competitive. While it got business leaders’ attention during its first decade, it has fallen off their radars over the last ten years. It’s hard to imagine the Baldrige program could have survived if it had not added the health care category.
So what will it take to get business leaders to consider the Baldrige model? Or is the program’s inability to market its product too complete to overcome?
To read more about the Baldrige Award, click on these articles:
- What Is Baldrige?
- How the Baldrige Award Works
- Baldrige 101
- How to Integrate Baldrige
- Baldrige Gets Results
- A Baldrige Leader
- Summaries of 2009 Baldrige Award Winning Applications
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It’s an interesting topic that has consumed a lot of time with examiners in the Tennessee state program (www.tncpe.org) over the last couple of years. I think examiners became so cliquish over time that the language we use to explain Baldrige is lost on most potential Baldrige users. We drive away the people that we most need to participate such as small business owners and manufacturers by making Baldrige sound overly complicated and academic. Examiners buy-in to the long-term benefits–the journey, but it’s hard to sell Baldrige to the non-indoctrinated without demonstrating some short-term payoff. We have to learn to get the word out in simple terms.