According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

THE NEED FOR QUALITY The first thing that we need to consider, in any organization, is that quality is the most important thing. The quality of your work defines you.  Whoever you are,  Whatever you do,  I can find the same products and services cheaper somewhere else. But your quality is your signature. Developing and delivering high quality products and services means that you are doing things correctly from the beginning. As a consequence, you are reducing the need for additional services, from verification to warranty.

Total quality management.

Over twenty years have passed since Nelson and Winter put the concept of routines firmly at the center of the analysis of organizational and economic change. A growing number of researchers have followed their example since. However, researchers have not always had the same idea of what routines are and what effect they have on organizations. Over time, this has left the literature on routines riddled with ambiguities. For researchers who want to apply the concept of routines in their research, it is not easy to get an overview of the current thinking about routines and their effects. This article offers a systematic review of the literature that has contributed to the theoretical development of the concept of routines, and of the empirical literature that has applied the concept of routines.

Organizational routines: a review of the literature

https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1270&context=mgmt_fac

Qualitative case studies in operations management: Trends, research outcomes, and future research implications

The aim of this paper is to extend the concept of dynamic capabilities. Building on prior research, we suggest that there are three levels of dynamic capabilities which are related to managers' perceptions of environmental dynamism. At the first level we find incremental dynamic capabilities: those capabilities concerned with the continuous improvement of the firm's resource base. At the second level are renewing dynamic capabilities, those that refresh, adapt and augment the resource base. These two levels are usually conceived as one and represent what the literature refers to as dynamic capabilities. At the third level are regenerative dynamic capabilities, which impact, not on the firm's resource base, but on its current set of dynamic capabilities, i.e. these change the way the firm changes its resource base. We explore the three levels using illustrative examples and conclude that regenerative dynamic capabilities may either come from inside the firm or enter the firm from outside, via changes in leadership or the intervention of external change agents.

Dynamic capabilities: An exploration of how firms renew their resource base

Continuous improvement (CI) in all aspects of the business is essential for meeting the challenge of today’s turbulent environments One increasingly popular strategy for enabling continuous improvement is through mobilising a high level of involvement of the workforce in sustained incremental problem-solving Although the potential benefits of such high involvement innovation are considerable, implementing programmes of this kind is not easy This paper reports on a five year research programme exploring implementation issues in CI and presents a framework model for the development of CI which draws upon extensive case study work In particular, it identifies a series of levels of CI performance and the blocks and enablers associated with them

High-involvement innovation through continuous improvement

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/6824.pdf

An evolutionary model of continuous improvement behaviour

Rediscovering continuous improvement

During the 1990s a growing number of firms have been encouraging continuous improvement (CI) in all aspects of working life, and some impressive results have been achieved. However, the process of implementing CI is long and challenging. Companies need to know what progress they have made, and the outcome of any interventions, in order to consolidate and further develop CI. The CIRCA CI self‐assessment tool is a research‐based tool which helps users to make an objective assessment of CI in their company. It is designed to be used by any organisation regardless of size, industry, length of time working with CI, and the particular approach taken. The tool went through several phases of development, culminating in a paper‐based Version 3.0 in 1997. Since then further development and testing of the tool has taken place in the UK and abroad, and future plans include an electronic version.

Development of a continuous improvement self‐assessment tool

Competition today is forcing companies to increase their effectiveness through exploiting synergy and learning in product innovation. Literature, however, is still mainly focused on how product development projects, seen largely as isolated efforts, should be organised and managed. This article proposes a model to describe and explain how companies can gain a substantive competitive advantage by extending their innovation efforts to other phases of the product life cycle and by facilitating knowledge transfer and learning both within the company and with other partner organisations. The model is based on collaborative research by the authors, based on their involvement in the Euro-Australian co-operation project CIMA (Euro-Australian co-operation centre for Continuous Improvement and innovation MAnagement).

Sarah Caffyn

Papers

High-involvement innovation through continuous improvement

An evolutionary model of continuous improvement behaviour

Rediscovering continuous improvement

Development of a continuous improvement self‐assessment tool

Knowledge and continuous innovation: The CIMA methodology