During the 1980s, Joseph Juran, one of the Baldrige Program’s first overseers, coined the term “Big Q” to serve as a quality “umbrella”: “Little q” would encompass goods and those processes directly related to the manufacture of goods, while “Big Q” would encompass all of an organization’s products, goods, and services, as well as all of its processes.

In alignment with Juran’s notion of encompassing all of the organization with quality practices, the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence today take a systems perspective. In other words, the Criteria provide a guide to managing all the components of an organization as a unified whole—Big Q. (In the Criteria’s early days, the focus was much more on the little q—i.e.,  focused on process and quality tools.)

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