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Publishers Weekly Review

Total quality management (TQM), the hot business topic, is frequently presented in a numbing, almost sacerdotal manner. But in their coherent analysis, George, a business consultant and author of The Baldrige Quality System and Weimerskirch, corporate quality director at Honeywell and a Baldridge Award panel judge, have managed to demythologize TQM. They provide a new management model in which ``companies work very hard at bringing their customers into their organization.'' To help managers achieve this goal and earn a profit, they outline Baldrige criteria and emphasize that ``leadership holds the key to the door of continuous improvement.'' With candor they note that TQM is not magic and that a minimum of two years is the time frame ``most companies of any size are looking at before the transition from a traditional management model to the new systems model begins to become institutionalized.'' Add to this the authors' superb coverage of customer-focused management, proactive employee environments and 53 superior case studies and you have the makings of this total quality book. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

George (The Baldrige Quality System, CH, Mar'93) and Weimerskirch (vice president, corporate quality at Honeywell, and chairman of the panel of judges for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award) provide a readable and up-to-date treatise on how the most effective companies are implementing quality improvement strategies. A model is presented in Chapter 1, and each chapter thereafter describes specific elements of the model using examples from companies like AT&T, Motorola, Xerox, and others, including 14 Baldrige Award winners. Topics include leadership, strategic planning, employee involvement, training, reward and recognition, and so on, but the primary emphasis is on customer satisfaction. Current issues such as process management and corporate responsibility are also covered. The book concludes with a six-phase model for transitioning to the systems approach to quality. Oriented to practitioners, this work is highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate collections. J. A. Neal; University of New Haven