Research Paper on:
Baldrige Award Companies' Characteristics

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
has long held that one of the best ways to achieve success is to study those that already have accomplished that goal, identifying winning attitudes and actions and then applying  them to another organization. This is the approach that Ritz-Carlton Hotels took to become the first service-industry Baldrige award winner in the early 1990s, and it remains a viable  tool for achieving greater quality in any organization. The purpose here is to identify aspects of lifelong learning; training and development; or corporate  education at several recently winning companies. Used for example here are Motorola, winner in 2002; Clarke American Checks and Pals Sudden Service, both 2001 winners of the Malcolm Baldrige  National Quality Award. All of these organizations practice each of these three qualities; the paper examines practice at only one organization for each characteristic. Lifelong Learning  One of the features of todays business environment is that organizations need to make the most efficient and highest use of all the resources available to  them. Deming (1986) urged managers to look to their employees for ideas in making processes more efficient in saying that the worker doing a specific job every day knows  that job better than anyone else possibly can. Clarke American Checks took this Deming admonition to heart, asking and then implementing - changes in process suggested by  the workers involved in those processes through daily operations. At Clarke American Checks, "more than 20,000 ideas from Clarke American associates were implemented  for a cost savings of an estimated $10 million" (Clarke American, 2002) in 2001 alone. Though the ideas arose from Clarke Americans own daily operations and those workers performing