IMPLEMENTING THE MALCOLM BALDRIGE PROCESS FOR A FINANCIAL INSTITUTION: AN INSIDERS PERSPECTIVE

The Malcolm Baldrige Framework for Performance Excellence outlines best practices for strategic and operational processes. Enterprises that achieve the award do so not for the award itself – but for the transformation that takes place along the way. Although the fifty-page summaries of Malcolm Baldrige award winning organizations are posted on the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) (https://www.nist.gov/baldrige/award-recipients), the process and effort used to create such applications has not been documented. This project documents and provides an internal perspective and lessons learned from the early stages of the Malcolm Baldrige journey for a medium size financial institution. The process included: training and collaboration between the author and the applicant, interviews to collect the Malcolm Baldrige responses and an official Malcolm Baldrige review. The main lesson learned was: The importance of the three Cs (Communication, Commitment and Change) when deploying new strategy. The top opportunity for improving the process is ensuring that there are effective processes for strategic execution across the enterprise – specifically parring Malcolm Baldrige implementation with the Hoshin Kanri method. We hope that anyone given the responsibility to help an organization embark on a Malcolm Baldrige journey for the first time will benefit from reading this contribution.