The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality award enhances the quality, productivity, and competitiveness of the US organizations and awarding of the organizations, which show high performance and improvement process. Baldrige quality program has provided the public sector with a model of assessing themselves and improve their quality standards. For instance, the public organizations use the Baldrige criteria to strengthen their leadership structures, administrative strategies and focus on their customers needs. The quality program is named after Malcolm Baldrige aimed at offering quality programs to stimulate American companies to improve the quality of goods and services. The program also aimed at establishing guidelines and criteria for businesses, industries, and government organizations in evaluating the quality of their products.

The national award program (BNQP) is under the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NJST) an agency in the Department of Commerce that assists the US industries through research and other technology related processes. There are seven criteria used in awarding performing companies such as in leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, and human resource focus. The others are process management. Although the Baldrige award has awarded few winners since its inception in 1988, several organizations benefits by using its assessment criteria to assess their performance and some other states have similar programs offered by Baldrige. The self-assessment process has various steps to follow and enable an organization rate itself. First top leaders have to comprehend the Baldrige process and commit themselves to its methods. Second, assessment teams consisting of agency personnel are formed and trained on the methods. The next step is data collection through examination of various documents and interviews to understand an organization’s current operation. A report is then made indicating the strengths and weaknesses of the organization under scrutiny then presented to the public. The organization leaders can then prioritize the problems to address and finally implement the action plans to their satisfaction.

The organization receives feedback on where it currently stands especially in leadership including its strengths and weaknesses. Once the organization receives its feedback report, the Baldrige develops improvement and monitoring plans in order of priorities. Recognition of the best organizations follows through various forms such as awards, feedback reports, and improvement recommendations. Baldrige has a number of core values such as visionary leadership, organizational and personal learning, customer-driven excellence, agility and focus on the future. The other values are managing for innovation, public responsibility, managing for facts, focus on results, and systems perspectives. These values assist several organizations in the world to address their issues such as employee satisfaction.

The Baldrige process can also have an impact on personal issues such as self-assessment. Just like organizations, people can assess themselves and rate their character and performance in their daily lives. By incorporating the Baldrige principles, people can learn a lot of things that help in improvement of their lives by following the seven steps of the criteria. Organizations can also learn a lot from the operations of the Baldrige process and improve their performance. My learning experience in this unit was quite interesting as I was able to understand my strengths and weaknesses through personal assessment and application of the Baldrige criteria.

My areas of the greatest development were in the management of time and resources and creativity to be able to run my businesses in the best way possible. However improvements on public responsibility as I should consider the effect of my activities to the public and nearby communities. One of the greatest lessons from the program is tat awards do not need to be in monetary or other tangible goods but the appreciation of one’s work and te willingness to improve on the weaknesses.