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Thursday, January 06, 2011
Join in New Mexico's Excellence Adventure
By Julia K. Gabaldon
President/CEO, Quality New Mexico
This year marks Quality New Mexico's 18th anniversary. In April, the business leader who challenged New Mexico to embark on a quality journey returns to our state to keynote Quality New Mexico's Learning Summit. Welcome back, Chris Galvin, Former Chairman and CEO of Motorola!
On Sept. 5, 1991, Galvin spoke at a Business Forum in Las Cruces at the invitation of Sen. Jeff Bingaman. Galvin shared the Motorola story and challenged New Mexico to become "a quality state," a more competitive state by embracing quality principles. Motorola received the 1988 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation's highest honor for organizational excellence.
Quality New Mexico opened its doors July 1993, and, in July 1994, Gov. Bruce King signed New Mexico Executive Order 94-20 establishing the New Mexico Quality Awards administered by Quality New Mexico.
Our key volunteers designed a three-tiered process (Pinon, Roadrunner and Zia) to help New Mexico's businesses and organizations improve their performance using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence as the road map to excellence.
Since 1994, Quality New Mexico has granted 660 New Mexico Quality Awards: 466 at Pinon Level (Commitment), 182 at Roadrunner Level (Progress), and 12 at Zia Level (Excellence).
Two of our Zia Award Recipients have achieved world-class excellence with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award: Los Alamos National Bank (2000) and VA Cooperative Studies Program Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center (2009).
Quality New Mexico continues to flourish.
In partnership with New Mexico Economic Development, we're offering performance excellence training and assessments across the state with a focus on rural communities. We're offering coaching and mentoring services to New Mexico organizations to help them improve their performance. And we have a new program focusing on education excellence, NMEXL, New Mexico Excellence in Learning.
Often times people ask if the Criteria for Performance Excellence work for education. The answer is a resounding "Yes!" It works for any organization that has leaders, employees and processes aimed at achieving outstanding outcomes.
Since 1999 when education became a Baldrige Award Category, nine educational institutions in the United States have achieved world-class excellence. Of those, six are public school districts and three are higher education institutions.
Jerry Weast, superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools, a 2010 Baldrige Award recipient, will join me on the radio — Performance Excellence USA on 77KKOB at 7 p.m. Saturday) to share his school district's best practices and outstanding student achievement outcomes.
We challenge you, New Mexico's leaders — business, education, government, health care and nonprofits — to commit your organizations to pursue performance excellence; your customers and employees will benefit greatly! Quality New Mexico is your resource; take advantage of our offerings!
And, of course, on April 19 and 20, you'll have an opportunity to learn "Best Practices" from the nation's best, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipients, and to recognize New Mexico's organizations that are improving their performance and striving for excellence at the New Mexico Quality Awards Ceremony.
We look forward to thanking Galvin for his challenge to make New Mexico a "Quality State." We know excellence is a journey and not a destination. We are committed to "A State of Excellence."
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