Business education is crucial for people who want to build successful companies and corporations. The business management history is full of outdated tools that worked in the past, but this field is constantly moving and changing. Many promising start-ups fail because the founders lack knowledge and skills, such as leadership, time management, communication, research, and analysis (Calma & Davies, 2021). The Malcolm Baldrige Business School is one of the educational institutions that provide indispensable sources of information for its students. Furthermore, the projects completed in the classes are essential for obtaining communicational and ethical aspects of leadership and business operations. This paper aims to summarize the experience of the BUS411 course and discuss how the values advocated at Malcolm Baldrige Business School influenced the work during the program.
Today, businesses are highly competitive; thus, start-up entrepreneurs cannot afford to waste time applying trial and error methods. Industry Today (2019) claims that “more than fifty percent of United States companies fail during the first five years after the launch” (para. 1). Business schools and colleges are vital for companies’ development as the fundamental values and knowledge. The Malcolm Baldrige Business School is a part of the Post University, founded in 1890, named after an American businessman Howard Malcolm Baldrige Jr. (Post University, n. d.). From 1981 until 1987, he served as the Secretary of Commerce in the United States Senate during the presidency of Ronald Reagan (Post University, n. d.). Baldrige was the one that brought authentic leadership, an innovative mindset, integrity, and excellence to the market and advocated the importance of quality for United States enterprises to maintain competitiveness (CFI Team, 2020). His ideas remain progressive and play a significant role in America’s businesses; therefore, the mission of Baldrige Business School is to enable beginner entrepreneurs to obtain and apply these values in their future work.
The Baldrige Business School has core values that help students learn the business and become entrepreneurs. I exhibited the principles during the course to complete the tasks related to assisting organizations in realizing the aspects of performance and management. There are several goals that the school encourages to achieve, such as equipping people with personal and organizational knowledge and overall effectiveness development. Baldrige’s core values and concepts are visionary leadership, customer-driven excellence, corporate and individual learning, and valuing the workforce and partners (CFI Team, 2020). I exhibited these aspects when I developed and presented my idea of the perfect organization and during the research about such successful businesses as Apple and Nike. Other values are agility, focus on the future, innovation management, management by fact, societal responsibility, focus on results and creating value, and systems perspective. They were relatively new to me because applying them to practice required theoretical knowledge and understanding of each aspect, which I achieved through reading the course literature.
The key takeaway from my study of the Baldrige core values was learning how to apply them beyond basic knowledge about them. Indeed, I researched the real business examples of how successful companies address agility, customer-driven excellence, visionary leadership, and other principles. This takeaway allowed me to memorize the values and develop ideas about how to integrate them into my organizational project or start-up. The course structured all information into seven categories that demonstrate the main business areas, including strategy, workforce, customers, leadership, measurement, analysis, and understanding of management, operations, and results (Post University, n. d.). The principles Baldrige advocated remain relevant today and will be applied and used by generations.
Another crucial takeaway from studying the core values presented in Baldrige Business School was that customer-centered service is the principle that helped many businesses keep their clients and earn much more. Amaresan (2022) mentions that “seventy-two percent of customers will share a positive experience with six or more people” (para. 3). I studied business from the internal operational perspective, and this principle changed the direction of my thinking toward considering a target consumer’s experiences. The takeaway about the value of customer-centered service will influence my decision-making related to developing strategies and building a successful company.
The Malcolm Baldrige Business School program contained valuable and current information about business development, entrepreneurship, and skills essential for succeeding in highly-competitive industries. Although the world changes daily, the Baldrige principles will remain indispensable for proper leadership, management, excellence, and organizational work (Post University, n. d.). Consequently, I aim to integrate every aspect of the Schschool’slues in my future career to ensure that my decision-making is relevant to my company’s goals. My purpose in completing the course was to obtain the core knowledge and values to start a large company that would create hundreds of jobs and improves thousands of individuals’ lives worldwide. For instance, agility, valuing workforce members, and societal responsibility are the principles I learned during the BUS411 experience, and I will utilize them to build a sustainable business with a thriving organizational culture.
Furthermore, the course included historical information about how the values were established and why the core ones maintained their importance throughout the years. Knowing how and why the principles develop will help me build my own life and business rules to rely on for success in my career. As I aim to grow a multinational corporation, I should consider visionary leadership as a core value, and it should have a solid foundation to be worth following by hundreds of employees with diverse backgrounds (Van der Voet & Steijn, 2021). Lastly, my career will significantly benefit from applying the principle of system perspective learned during the course because it provides essential strategies to create efficient operations. I studied this value in detail and read additional literature about systems integration and optimization as I know that it will help me spend time wisely and develop proper work algorithms.
To conclude, the Malcolm Baldrige Business School is an educational institution that should be highly recommended to everyone who wants to understand business and its principles. The core values of the course were visionary leadership, customer-driven excellence, learning and valuing the workforce and partners, agility, management, innovations, societal responsibility, focus on results and creating value, and systems perspective. I applied them while completing the curriculum’s tasks, and it helped me understand how each principle works and why it is crucial for successful business operations. I also researched the real companies’ examples to study how the Baldrige core values are integrated into their operations. Thus, the key course takeaway for me was learning to use the principles in practice while building my career and successful life. My goal for participating in the Baldrige program was to gather sufficient knowledge about business processes, and I achieved it. I also understood that such values as visionary leadership and system perspective should be considered throughout my career to helping me build a multinational corporation with hundreds of employees.
References
Amaresan, S. (2022). Why customer service is important: 16 data-backed facts to know. HubSpot.
Calma, A., & Davies, M. (2021). Critical thinking in business education: Current outlook and future prospects.Studies in Higher Education, 46(11), 2279-2295.
CFI Team. (2020). Malcolm Baldrige national quality award. CFI.
Industry Today. (2019). Why is business education important today? Industry Today.
Post University. (n. d.). The Malcolm Baldrige School of Business.
Van der Voet, J., & Steijn, B. (2021). Team innovation through collaboration: How visionary leadership spurs innovation via team cohesion.Public Management Review, 23(9), 1275-1294.