The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Process has grown in 12 years to be one of the most positive and influential prgrams to come out of Washington D.C. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) uses a measure of performance of the publicly traded Baldrige Award winners that compares these companies' stock price appreciation with the S&P 500 Index. In the most recent year, the "Baldrige Fund" outperformed the S&P Index by a margin of almost 5 to 1. Most companies will never apply for a Baldrige Award. However, many companies have used a Baldrige-based assessment criteria to evaluate their business and to focus their improvement efforts. The author has written a very useful guide for managers to use in deploying a Baldrige-based assessment system. As a senior Baldrige examiner I know that most companies need guidance to gain maximum benefit from an internal assessment process. Mr. Hutton's book is a must read for any manager or consultant before undertaking Baldrige-based assessment. It will also be useful to managers seeking ideas to improve an existing approach. In Baldrige-based assessments, the "how" question is looking for systematic approaches to the management systems in an organization. In this book, the author describes a systematic approach to assessment and provides illustrations through case studies of a variety of companies and how they use the process to get better at getting better.

If leaders of any service business expect to achieve and sustain an outstanding level of service quality, they must sooner or later turn their attention to the organization itself as the means of achieving customer/ citizen focus..The culture, the vision and direction, the leadership, the alignment of resources and functions, and the motivation and commitment of the workers are all essential ingredients for service excellence. Therefore, if you hope to get things right on the outside, you first have to get things right on the inside. David Hutton takes us through the steps needed for an organization to undertake an organizational assessment His road map provides guidance and examples for users and acquirers of assessment instruments to develop a quality management system. There are at least 5 important elements that you need for conducting an assessment to drive organizational change: a genuine commitment by the leadership, an assessment model, an assessment method, competent assessors, and the prerequisite of reading David Hutton's book.