Beyond Total Quality Management: Toward The Emerging Paradigm

Rating:
Summary: Beyond Planning, Organizing, Leading and Controlling, too.
Review: Most management texts do an adequate job of describing the latest innovations, but with rare exceptions they do so in a framework first suggested in 1916 by Henri Fayol. Very few managers nowadays allocate specific effort to planning, organizing, leading and controlling, but that's the way most management texts are still divided up.

This book is a refreshing exception. The authors organize their ideas around three managerial roles:

Assuring continuous improvement
Organizing to improve cross-functional systems
Enhancing customer value.

There are sections on employee involvement and organizational learning, with lots of examples throughout citing firms such as Saturn, Xerox and Federal Express. The style is skeptical and readable.

One shortcoming: Having a high-quality hiring process is your most important success factor. For that, ignore the advice in this book and look at Lou Adler's "Hire with Your Head."

In all other respects, it's a great book.

Rating:
Summary: Too much paper for incomplete concepts
Review: The book is well written but many crucial concepts are weakly communicated.