Improving Performance Through the Baldrige Organizational Profile: An Application in Business Education (Report‪)‬

ABSTRACT In recent years, business education has come under attack. CEOs, recent graduates, and business school faculty themselves are complaining that the Academy is not preparing students to deal with the complex, unquantifiable aspects of leading and managing organizations. The relevance of the business curriculum is being questioned. At the same time, in the last couple of decades, a number for formal systems and frameworks for improving organizational performance have been developed and deployed. These include the ISO series of standards for quality and environmental standards, principles of lean production, Six Sigma and the criteria framework of the quality awards. Of these, the use of quality award frameworks is of particular interest because it is motivated by the organization's desire to improve performance on a voluntary basis, unlike other systems which are often mandated by customers. In this paper, we discuss the use of a specific aspect (the Organizational Profile) of a quality award, i.e., the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award of the U.S.A. in a specific context, i.e., in business education. The paper highlights an innovative instructional approach in which business students develop organizational diagnostic and consulting skills through the application of the Baldrige Organizational Profile (OP) as a performance improvement tool. It demonstrates how students translate the OP and apply it to a real life organization. It describes the process and the outcomes in terms of learning and benefits for both the students and their client organizations.