Could be that Mac Baldrige”™s standards are just too damned tough for you, too.
Or maybe you”™re tough enough.
The Connecticut Quality Improvement Awards program hits the quarter-century mark this year, with CQIA feeding into the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program overseen by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The NIST program is named for the late U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige Jr., who at one time was CEO of Scovill Inc. before the button and fastener maker moved its headquarters from Waterbury to Georgia.
CQIA also awards innovation prizes. Over the years, nearly 600 Connecticut companies have won state-level awards, with more of them in Stamford than any other locale. To date, Xerox Corp. is the only Connecticut-based company to have won the national Baldrige award (in 1989 and 1997, before it relocated its headquarters from Stamford to Norwalk).
Last year, researchers at the University of North Carolina and Dartmouth College estimated the Baldrige program”™s benefits outweigh its costs by a whopping 1,252-to-1 majority, after accounting for the impact the process has in areas like cost savings, customer satisfaction and financial gain.
We know that does not mean an organization becomes a thousand times better overnight by running the Baldrige gauntlet. And there are plenty of other quality programs to pursue, between ISO 9001, Six Sigma, the American Society for Quality Certification and industry-specific stamps of approval.
But just about any quest for quality can only help a company, right? So why did businesses last year submit the lowest number of applications in the 25 years the Baldrige award has been bestowed in Connecticut, at just over 60 in all?
CQIA”™s Executive Director Sheila Carmine thinks the economy had a lot to do with that, with people working harder with more limited resources to earn the same amount.
“Business was not that good,” Carmine says. “We”™ll see if it”™s changed.”
Carmine recalls one meeting several years back where a woman at a local high-tech company stood up and said something to the effect of, “This Baldrige is too damned tough.”
Carmine is the first to point out that the CQIA quality standards are exacting, though the innovation prize is a far simpler application.
So why do it at all?
“What I think is the best reason ”“ it”™s your company, you show your company is really on the cutting edge,” Carmine says.
