The Mountain has to go to Mahomet – President George Bush yesterday presented the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award to IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota facility, but the ceremonies were held at the US Department of Commerce in Washington; the Baldrige Award, named for the late Commerce Secretary, is the highest quality honour conferred on American business: accepting the award for the AS/400 and medium-scale disk drive plant, chairman John Akers was not his usual super-bullish self, responding with a reflective winning today is no guarantee of success tomorrow – winning means we are headed in the right direction, but as customers’ expectations keep rising, we must keep raising the level of our own performance; the more American companies that can compete against each other with the quality demanded today, the better America will compete in the world, Akers said.
