Issue 1
Sunday, January 16, 2000
Welcome to the inaugural issue of the BaldrigePlus.com Newsletter.

As we say on the home page 'If you are serious about doing better - and about helping your organisation do better, whatever it does - the you should be serious about Baldrige'. And if you are, we're here to help!

2000 is shaping to be an interesting year for this project, with a number of case studies to be published, new commercial products to develop and market, and an ever expanding network of contacts. We're about to register the site with over 1,500 search engines. Traffic is building - we recently had our first day with more than 100 unique visitors to the site, and weekly visitor numbers should exceed 500 this week. Not big numbers, but until recently we've been quite hard to find!

Got something to share?
Links, resources, ideas, questions, new publications, obscure resources, news and gossip about quality, performance excellence, Baldrige, or any other award schemes? How about sharing it with the people on our newsletter list? Email us, we’ll include it in the next issue.

Links
There’s a (slowly) growing list of links on Baldrigeplus.com, but if you ever find yourself wondering where you saw that obscure reference to Six Sigma, or need to track down some material on the new ISO standard, or whatever, the best quality-related links resource on the web is Bill Casti’s at www.quality.org

For a list of Baldrige award application summaries, go to the Quality Today site (see “Shameless Self Promotion” below for the address). If you know of any other application summaries on the web please email the address details. We’ll add them to our list.

The fall and rise of quality
Where do you go for good concise explanations of TQM, the role of quality in industry, and the twentieth century history of quality? What about a disinterested and thoughtful analysis of the top ten quality gurus? I’ll bet no-one held their hand up for the British government’s Department of Trade and Industry (OK, OK … there’s always a smart guy in the front row). Even if you don’t have time for the whole nine yards, at least check out this summary

Publications
Keep an eye on Quality Digest (available on line) for Pat Townsend & Joan Gebhardt’s column featuring the Auckland Hospital Staff Preschool, a BaldrigePlus.com case study that is achieving modest fame as the world’s first published study of the use of the Baldrige criteria in the early childhood sector. Not sure whether the column will be in the February or March issue. We’ll put a link to it on our front page as soon as it’s published.

Away from the mainstream
Performance excellence is not only an issue for business, education and healthcare organisations (the current extent of the ‘official’ Baldrige criteria). It’s just as important for not-for-profit, volunteer, and other non-commercial organisations, and in areas like city/local government and the social services - NGO and government-provided. We get occasional requests for contacts and resource material in these areas, and can sometimes help. Brian Loebig, for example, is compiling a 'social services' links list (also here, at Quality Today), and we’d be interested here at Baldrigplus.com in hearing about any other activities going on in this and other non-mainstream areas.

We’re also working on a case study in city government (an award winner in a Baldrige-derived scheme), and would particularly appreciate any links or contacts to work in that area.

Shameless self-promotion
Quality Today’s on-line resources include a newly developed and potentially valuable library of quality-related topics, each one established and maintained by a QT advisor. It’s a good idea, and guess who’s the QT advisor for Baldrige? Go see, and if you’ve got links that you think should be included, please suggest them.