The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program at NIST is pleased to announce the names of 18 executives who are set to begin a year-long leadership development journey in the prestigious Baldrige Executive Fellows Program in April 2024. The competitively selected fellows will gain one-on-one access to Baldrige Award recipients—nationally recognized, role-model organizations in business and other sectors. 

Fellows to Learn from World-Class Organizations

Through planned visits to Baldrige Award recipient sites across the United States, as well as networking with other executives, the new Baldrige Fellows will study how world-class U.S. organizations and their senior leaders achieve strategic and operational excellence and stimulate innovation. Within a collegial environment, they will have a unique opportunity to compare the perspectives of executives across sectors, share candid advice on leadership challenges, and use the insights they gain to address a strategic challenge or opportunity within their own organizations as part of individual capstone projects.

“The Baldrige Executive Fellows Program is the only executive leadership fellowship that provides one-on-one access to Baldrige Award recipients and the opportunity to learn role-model management strategies from these high-performing executives,” said National Institute of Standards and Technology Director and Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology Laurie E. Locascio. To the executives, Locascio recently stated, “It is our belief that your participation in this program will benefit you personally, your organization, and your organization’s key stakeholders—employees, customers, patients, partners, suppliers, and the larger community. Now is a perfect time for executives with vision and foresight to understand and apply the Baldrige concepts as a means to improving their organization and its sustainability.”

Since its inception in 2010, the Baldrige Executive Fellows Program has graduated more than 150 executives. Graduates’ capstone projects have documented the wide-ranging improvements they’ve designed, including overhauling strategic planning processes, innovating supplier networks, creating high-reliability health care organizations, lessening patients’ reliance on opioids after surgery, improving employee engagement, engaging physicians, overhauling communication processes for diverse workforces, standardizing work processes, better preparing students for professional careers, and reimagining population health and community health outcomes.

Fellows have come from all sectors of the U.S. economy and have visited and personally met with hundreds of Baldrige Award recipient senior leaders, visiting facilities, factories, hospital floors, hotels, restaurants, parks, and airports, among other sites they visited, to build understanding of role-model strategies to lead a high-performing organization. 

Learn more about the Baldrige Fellows and how to apply.

In conjunction with NIST and the private sector, the Baldrige Program manages the Baldrige Award, which was established by Congress in 1987. The Baldrige Program promotes resilience, innovation, and excellence in organizational performance, recognizes the achievements and results of U.S. organizations, and publicizes successful performance strategies. The Baldrige Program also offers the 2023–2024 Baldrige Excellence Framework: Proven leadership and management practices for high performance, which includes the regularly revised and world-emulated Criteria for Performance Excellence.