In August 1987, Congress created the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, a public-private partnership that spawned a global movement. This small program was given a great big purpose: to improve the quality and performance of U.S. businesses so as to improve our national competitiveness. As a nation, we struggled at that time to produce high-quality, low-cost products and services, and we were losing market share and jobs to global competition.

The Baldrige Program was established to help turn that around, and for the past 29 years, we have been extremely successful, establishing a globally recognized standard of excellence used to facilitate and enable a systems approach to organizational excellence and improved outcomes in businesses, nonprofits, educational institutions, and healthcare providers of all kinds.

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