ASQ Salutes 2008 Baldrige Award Recipients

ASQ education subject matter expert Terry Holliday has a special interest in the 2008 Baldrige awards announced on November 25. He is the superintendent of the Iredell-Statesville school district — the sole educational institution among this year’s three Baldrige recipients. Holliday, a member of ASQ’s Primary-Secondary Education Advisory Committee, also writes an ASQ blog on continuous improvement in education. 

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez joined President George W. Bush in announcing that three organizations—one each from manufacturing, healthcare, and education—are the recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for 2008. 

Gutierrez hailed the recipients as role models “embodying the values of excellence, principled leadership, and commitment to employees, customers, partners, and community.”

The recipients are:

• Cargill Corn Milling North America, Wayzata, Minn.
  The company’s 2300 employees manufacture corn- and sugar-based products for the food, feed, and fermentation markets. Employee teams use a best practice model to design innovative work processes that address efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and cost control requirements. 

• Poudre Valley Health System, Fort Collins, Colo.
  This locally owned, private, not-for-profit healthcare organization serves residents of northern Colorado, western Nebraska, and southern Wyoming through two hospitals and a network of clinics and care facilities. PVHS extensively involves customers and community stakeholders and consistently garners high marks for clinical performance, competitive healthcare costs, and patient and physician satisfaction.

• Iredell-Statesville Schools, Statesville, N.C. 
  This K-12 public school district transformed its culture from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning for students in its 35 schools in southwestern North Carolina. Despite lower per-pupil expenditures, the Iredell-Statesville schools have outperformed comparative districts at the state and national level. Fact-based, data-driven decision making in the classrooms supports learning and continuous improvement. This leads to steadily improving reading proficiency, test performance, and graduation rates, among other measures.

Additional information on the award and this year’s recipients is available from the Baldrige National Quality Program.

ASQ assists with the Baldrige application review process, preparation of award documents, publicity, and information transfer under contract with the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, which manages the award.