Page 141 - The New Gold Standard

Build a Business Focused on Others
Can’t We? which examined how Japanese automobile manufac-
turers were surpassing U.S. carmakers across a variety of quality
indicators. This exposé led to a U.S. government call to action,
spearheaded by then Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige,
who encouraged U.S. businesses to accelerate improvement of
quality across all industries.
To facilitate this process, Baldrige gathered a team of thought
leaders from academia and a cross section of businesses to deter-
mine the criteria for a “world-class,” quality-driven company.
Subsequently, the Baldrige Award was established not only to
help businesses measure themselves against world-class quality
standards but also to offer recognition and encourage the trans-
fer of knowledge throughout the American business landscape.
Criteria considered in the Baldrige assessment process include
visionary leadership, customer-driven excellence, organizational
and personal learning, agility, focus on the future, managing for
innovation, attention to results and creating value, and social re-
sponsibility.
Ritz-Carlton submitted its first application for the Malcolm
Baldrige Award in 1991. According to John Timmerman, vice
president of quality and program management, “The learning
we received from this process was extremely rich, and it identi-
fied significant gaps in our business model. We knew that clos-
ing those gaps would help ensure our performance excellence
and sustainability. In essence, we looked outside ourselves to
elevate our quality processes. To our delight, in 1992 we won the
award. That victory validated all of the effort we had made to
close the gaps that the Baldrige examiners had identified. It also
put us in the position to help other companies model our pro-
cesses and success.”
Over the years, the leadership team at Ritz-Carlton has
“closed gaps” in their business processes by imitating and innovat-
ing from the best practices of other trend-setting organizations.
For example, realizing that Ritz-Carlton lacked a well-defined
process for designing new products and services, leadership

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