John Carroll university Fall 2006 ��

For more than a decade, Dean Luis Calingo of the Boler School has spread the gospel of quality management to government and university leaders in a number of Asian countries. This effort began when the United States Information Agency asked Dean Calingo to lecture on qual-ity management in his native Philippines. The educator was chosen because he had become an expert in the Baldrige National Quality Program, named after the late Malcolm Baldrige, secretary of commerce during the Reagan administration.

America’s National Institute of Standards and Technology honors achievements in domestic quality and productivity with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The Baldrige quality criteria have become synonymous throughout the world as the standard for the achievement of excellence in business and institutional performance.

Calingo began taking the quality mes-sage to the Philippines in 1994 and he has returned every year since to coach business and educational leaders on systematically creating and assessing quality management in a variety of organizations. He has done a similar service in Vietnam for four years, and he will go back to Thailand for the fifth time this summer. One of his contri-butions to Thailand has been to guide the implementation of an academic accredita-tion process for Thai higher education.

The dean has done versions of the same teaching of quality assessment and management in Indonesia, Mongolia, Pakistan, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. In each case of what he calls “my national service,” Calingo operates with a basic in-structional template, which he calibrates

to annual changes in the Baldrige award criteria and customizes to fit the particu-lars of a given society.

The leader of the Boler School says, “I help train the quality assessors. The lead-ers I work with go out into those lands to diagnose various organizations, using the Baldrige quality framework and eventually impart those diagnostic skills to others. In a place like Thailand, I probably come in contact with about 100 leaders – senior managers and government leaders – every year. I’m teaching the teachers, and a mul-tiplier effect results.”

He says that since the living expenses stipend he receives is generally very mod-est, his work in Asia qualifies as service in his own and his students’ estimation. “Most of these governments,” said the dean, “cannot afford expensive consul-tants, so they are pleased to have the expertise of someone like me.”

Dean Calingo is bringing quality management to

Asian nations.

A secondary benefit comes out of estab-lishing relations with academic, govern-mental and institutional leaders in these nations. They, in turn, are eager to facili-tate academic partnerships between univer-sities in their countries and the American institutions with which Dean Calingo has been associated. Since he has only been at John Carroll for seven months that kind of development has not occurred here yet, but the dean expects it will.

The primary benefit of Dean Calingo’s international work in teaching qual-ity management is, of course, that he is playing a significant role in fostering the economic development of a number of so-cieties, which are responsible for the well-being of many millions of human beings.

Dr. luis Calingo