Credit: BPEP
Unfortunately, it’s official: Barb Fischer will soon retire from the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program (BPEP). Her colleagues are trying to focus on how this change will be good for
her but frankly, we’re gonna miss her! In the meantime, we honor her service.
In her career of 40 years, Barb has served the last 18 at NIST’s BPEP. As she joined BPEP after working at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), one might have assumed that her experience in a hierarchical military organization would create difficulty for her transition to our relatively “flat,” highly collaborative structure based on self-managed teams. But she had already alternated assignments as a leader or member of a series of integrated project teams at the Naval Air Systems Command, which prepared her well for BPEP’s work environment.
Credit: NIST
It was a lucky day for the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program when Ellen Garshick joined the staff in 2007.
From her interviews, staff members saw that she was exceptionally talented. The long list of clients of her previous editorial work included prestigious organizations, and her publication samples demonstrated masterful skills. What also deeply impressed everyone from the start were her interpersonal skills. Such a mix of editorial expertise and social intelligence would have made her an asset for publications work in any organization. At BPEP, we recognized she would be an ideal fit for our collaborative work environment rooted in a structure of self-managed teams.