The complexity of today’s business environment has made it ecessary to evaluate all the alternatives before committing resources to an improvement process. Combines total business management, total cost management, total productivity management, total quality management, and total technology...

Points out that we have accepted on faith many of our improvement tools without really understanding their impact on the performance of the organization. Challenges some of the basic principles on which total quality management was founded. Presents data from the International Quality Study...

Suggests that organizational improvement methodologies have a life cycle. This takes them through the stages of being the “in” thing to do, then into a decline because they are no longer exciting or have failed to produce results. Ultimately they are left being pursued by only a few...

Through the use of total quality management programmes, the industrialised western economies have made great strides in improving quality, reducing waste and increasing productivity. It was our hope that these improvements would recapture our market share, recreating the jobs we lost in the...