Managing Quality Fads or Keeping Currrent with Texas Real Estate MCE

Managing Quality Fads: How American Business Learned to Play the Quality Game

Author: Robert E Col

Can managers learn from fads? That is the question Robert Cole addresses in this insightful book about the various factors supporting and inhibiting organizational learning.

A longtime student of the Japanese and American quality movements, Cole focuses on the response of American industry to the challenge posed in the early 1980s by high quality goods from Japan. While most American managers view this challenge as slowly but successfully met, many academics see the quality movement that emerged from it as just another fad. In seeking to reconcile these two views, Cole explores the reasons behind American industry's slow response to Japanese quality, arguing that a variety of institutional factors inhibited management action in the early 1980s. He then describes the reshaping of institutions that allowed American companies to close the quality gap and to achieve sustained quality improvements in the 1990s.

Hewlett-Packard serves as an example of a company that made this institutional transition more effectively than most. Cole describes Hewlett-Packard's successful strategies while also pointing out the serious problems that it and other companies face as they attempt to adapt, improve, and go beyond Japanese practices. He also uses Hewlett-Packard, an exemplar of the highly decentralized company, to explore effective strategies for the creation, dissemination, and implementation of knowledge.

Unprecedented as a scholarly treatment of the quality movement,Managing Quality Fads provides several important lessons for those interested in management decision making under conditions of uncertainty and organizational transformation in a rapidly changing businessenvironment.

"Recommended for graduate, faculty, and professional collections."--Choice

"Cole's treatment of the quality movement contains lessons for managers as they deal with current and future organizational challenges inherent in learning and change."--CalBusiness

"Cole's treatise is historically substantive and places quality within a broader conceptual framework. [. . .] Well written, objective, and extensively documented, Managing Quality Fads will be of considerable interest to students of business process improvement and enterprise-wide organizational change, as well as to corporate strategists who want to apply the lessons learned by manufacturing firms in the 1980s and early 1990s to today's highly competitive E-commerce business environment."--Academy of Management Executive

Table of Contents:

	Tables and Figures
	Introduction	3
1	The New Quality Model: Continuity or Discontinuity?	18
2	Market Pressures and Quality Consciousness	46
3	How Much Did You Know and When Did You Know It?	63
4	It Ain't Rocket Science, But ...	82
5	Casting and Harvesting the Nets	104
6	Putting It Together	129
7	Modeling the Future for Hewlett-Packard	161
8	Adoption, Adaptation, and Reaction at Hewlett-Packard	184
9	Quality Outcomes	216
10	On Organizational Learning	233
	Notes	249
	References	259
	Index	273

Interesting book: Coping with Lyme Disease or Raw

Keeping Currrent with Texas Real Estate MCE

Author: Charles J Jacobus

To stay as current and up-to-date as possible, rely on this well-known and popular MCE title. Completely updated to match the new TREC mandates, you'll find the topics included are exactly what you need to know to align with the new state requirements. The newest figures from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are also included, along with hot topics of interest such as the amendment to the Real Estate License Act that requires a broker who represents both buyer and seller to act as an intermediary. Along with new cases, count on Jacobus, Wiedemer and Goeters, the most respected Texas real estate authors, to deliver the most up-to-date MCE material available.