Managing Quality Fads

An author who has been writing about Japanese and American quality movements for over twenty years, Robert E. Cole began studying Japanese practices in the mid-1970s and then looked at how these practices were--or were not--adopted by U.S. firms in the 1980s. As a consultant to Fortune 500 companies he has witnessed first-hand the progress of corporate efforts to respond to the Japanese challenge. In 1993 he was inducted into the InternationalAcademy of Quality, whose membership is limited to 20 North American experts and 60 members worldwide. He is the editor of The Death and Life of the American Quality Movement (Oxford University Press, 1995). He isProfessor of Business Administration and Sociology, and Laura Tyson Mitchell II Professor of Leadership and Communication, in the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.

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• Tables and Figures Introduction 1: The New Quality Model: Continuity or Discontinuity? 2: Market Pressures and Quality Consciousness 3: How Much Did You Know and When Did You Know It? 4: It Ain't Rocket Science, But... 5: Casting and Harvesting the Nets 6: Putting It Together 7: Modeling the Future for Hewlett-Packard 8: Adoption, Adaptation, and Reaction at Hewlett-Packard 9: Quality Outcomes 10: On Organizational Learning Notes References Index