On October 1, the Society for Standards Professionals (SES) honored the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program with a third-place win for its paper "The Metrology of Organizational Performance: How Baldrige Standards Have Become the Common Language for Organizational Excellence Around the World."
Along with the other two winners, the Baldrige paper will be published in the SES journal, Standards Engineering; it can also be downloaded and shared. The paper contains many testimonials and data on the value around the world of implementing the Baldrige framework as a systematic framework for performance improvement or as an internal assessment tool.
An excerpt from the paper follows:
The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence are accepted around the world as the gold standard for organizational performance excellence—a body of principles and considerations that when used as a management framework lead to improved performance results in organizations. . . .
Standards are the world's common language, and in the realm of organizational performance excellence and the measurement of organizational performance, there are no more impactful standards than the ones found in the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. These standards have become a common language for every type of organization, touching countries around the globe. They have contributed to the success of industries and subindustries within manufacturing, business, health care, education, and nonprofits. Through this success, they have helped hospitals save lives, educators to improve learning outcomes for children, and businesses to create jobs and be more efficient. In the celebration of the global importance of standards, the Baldrige Criteria rank as the gold standard for the measurement and recognition of performance excellence—in other words, the metrology of performance excellence—around the world.
World Standards Day, with its 2015 theme of "Standards: The World's Common Language," is celebrated annually around the world to increase awareness of the role that standards play in the global economy. The World Standards Day Paper Competition is an effort to celebrate the global importance of standards and to honor selected individuals in the U.S. standards community.