Baldrige Quest News Today

Credit: MESA In 2020, MESA, a small business in Oklahoma, became the first and only (to date) three-time Baldrige Award recipient. From a one-person consulting firm founded in 1979, MESA has grown to support a workforce of over 250 people. The largest privately owned company in its market, it is a manufacturing and field services firm headquartered in Tulsa, with 10 U.S. locations. According to Terry May, MESA president and founder, MESA’s national footprint positions it as the t...

Larry Smith Credit: Larry Smith Laurence (“Larry”) Smith is a long-time advocate of quality and systems-thinking-based management of U.S. businesses. In the early 1980s, while he was leading a chamber of commerce in northeastern Massachusetts, Smith recognized “the need for a transformation of American management,” he told me recently. A learning experience that inspired him to appreciate a holistic, systems view of business leadership and management was a four-day worksho...