Early History of The Baldrige Program
- In the early and mid-1980s, many U.S. industry and government leaders saw that a renewed emphasis on quality was necessary for doing business in an ever-expanding and more competitive world market. But many U.S. businesses either did not believe quality mattered for them or did not know where to begin.
- The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act of 1987, signed into law on August 20, 1987, was developed through the actions of the National Productivity Advisory Committee, chaired by Jack Grayson. The nonprofit research organization APQC, founded by Grayson, organized the first White House Conference on Productivity, spearheading the creation of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1987. The Baldrige Award was envisioned as a standard of excellence that would help U.S. organizations achieve world-class quality.
- In the late summer and fall of 1987, Dr. Curt Reimann, the first director of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program, and his staff at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed an award implementation framework, including an evaluation scheme, and advanced proposals for what is now the Baldrige Award.
- In its first three years, the Baldrige Award was jointly administered by APQC and the American Society for Quality, which continues to assist in administering the award program under contract to NIST.
Read more about this topic: Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award
Famous quotes containing the words early, history and/or program:
“Make-believe is the avenue to much of the young child’s early understanding. He sorts out impressions and tries out ideas that are foundational to his later realistic comprehension. This private world sometimes is a quiet, solitary
world. More often it is a noisy, busy, crowded place where language grows, and social skills develop, and where perseverance and attention-span expand.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“Treat the cow kindly, boys; remember she’s a lady—and a mother.”
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)