The road to Performance Excellence is long . Mildly put, it is challenging.

The challenges along this journey can be overcome if organizations:
- make a habit of Continuous Improvement
- design Best-in-Class products / services and processes
- grow their Best Practices to innovative Next Practices.

All this through top-down organization-wide engagement of leaders, managers, supervisors and workers.

The Baldrige model for Performance Excellence reflects the above through the Scoring Guidelines. Collectively, these four points are the critical success factors for achieving Performance Excellence.