This book offers a basic and practical guide for a manager, quality practitioner, or anyone interested in learning and understanding the fundamental principles, concepts, tools, and techniques of quality management and process improvement. This book enables managers to have a strong foundation for effective management and improvement of operations. It strengthens quality practitioners’ approach to people, products, or services and process improvement, to influence without authority. It provides practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of the contemporary concepts of quality, guiding principles, and quality tools and techniques and on successfully implementing them. It helps enhance how practitioners perform their work and inspires them to strive for excellence. The book begins with an introduction and an overview of quality, followed by listing and explaining the selected 77 pillars (basic principles, concepts, and tools) of quality, grouped under the themes of quality, Six Sigma, and Lean Management. It examines the logical understanding of these pillars and how to implement them, providing practical examples and beneficial real case studies. The stories are based on the learning and practical experience of the author—a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, a quality manager, and a university lecturer. This book benefits employees, partners, and customers of any organization, offering a great reference for practitioners and academics alike. It serves as a call to reflect on basic quality pillars first, before embarking on a quality improvement journey. It provides a solid foundation for managers and practitioners to exceed their customers’ expectations and excel in managing their business operations.

As a facility manager, you're concerned with building quality into your operation but possibly unsure about how to go about it in a systematic way. Perhaps it's because a Total Quality Management program seems too imposing and costly for your department to undertake. Or maybe you're leery of certain aspects of such a concerted effort, like measuring quality or marketing facility services, because they've never been adequately explained to you. Possessing considerable backgrounds in facility management, Stormy Friday and Dave Cotts understand these uncertainties. In Quality Facility Management, they have pooled their knowledge and experience to develop a comprehensive resource that demystifies the quality movement and shows you how to apply the old-fashioned but enduring commonsense principles of quality management often overshadowed by TQM. Flecked with humor and written as if the authors were simply talking to you, this refreshing new book identifies the five major elements underpinning any effective quality facility management program and takes you step by step through each one in a detailed yet accessible way. Gradually, you learn how to put these elements all together and—by incorporating selected modern techniques—devise a program to meet your specific situation. With the help of real-world examples, checklists, and other how-to aids, Quality Facility Management reveals: Why customers must be the driving force behind your quality effort, how you can exceed customers' performance expectations, and how you can effectively recover from service mistakes How quality facility management has its roots in TQM, what constitutes the major aspects of a TQM program, and how you can implement quality facility management without a full-blown TQM program Which aspects of your operation need to be measured and evaluated, which measuring tools should be used, and how to get your customers involved in the measurement process How to develop a facility marketing plan that increases awareness of your services, improves your image as a provider, and acts as an "insurance policy" in retaining the support of senior management in the face of organizational upheaval How to engineer a program of continuous quality improvement by assuming a specific leadership role, empowering frontline staff, instituting effective customer service training, and partnering with vendors The final chapter provides a bounty of practical case histories of companies that are realizing quality facility management right now, including major organizations like Celestica, Bell Atlantic, Hewlett-Packard, and Lockheed. Here, you'll find ample evidence of quality tools and strategies at work—from interior preventive maintenance crews to staff productivity improvements, infrastructure planning teams to customer satisfaction programs. Indeed, whether you're in the public or private sector, in a large or small facility, part of an in-house organization or a contracted firm, Quality Facility Management enables you to plan, organize, staff, direct, and evaluate for quality, so that you maximize your department's responsiveness to customers and your value to top management. Quality facility management is the only way to do business. Here's the only way to do quality facility management. Facility managers want to answer the call for quality but many feel they don't have the resources or guidance to make it an essential feature of their operation. Total Quality Management programs require too much of them and various aspects of the quality effort, whether it's quality measurement or facility marketing, seem hard to carry out or even beside the point. Finally there's a sensible guide that enables you to build quality into your department simply by applying basic, old-fashioned quality principles and selected modern techniques—Quality Facility Management With the assistance of examples, checklists, and other handy tools, this invigorating resource reveals the five key aspects of quality facility management and shows you how to bring them all together to develop a program that fits your particular circumstances. Emphasizing why your customers are the driving force behind your quality efforts, Quality Facility Management helps you: Surpass customers' performance expectations and recover effectively from even the most damaging mistakes Provide quality facility management without implementing a formal TQM program Accurately measure critical aspects of your operation and act effectively on that feedback Devise a facility marketing plan that enhances your department's image with customers and top management Put a program of continuous quality improvement into effect through leadership, staff training and empowerment, vendor collaborations, and other proven means Packed with case studies of facility managers who are building quality into their operation, Friday and Cotts's Quality Facility Management illustrates how your quest for quality can dramatically upgrade customer and senior management satisfaction—without draining department resources.

This book offers a basic and practical guide for any manager, quality practitioner, or anyone interested in learning and understanding the fundamental principles, concepts, tools, and techniques of quality management and process improvement. This book enables managers to have a strong foundation for effective management and improvement of operations. It strengthens quality practitioners' approach to people, products, or services and process improvement, to influence without authority. It provides practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of the contemporary concepts of quality, guiding principles, quality tools and techniques, and successfully implementing them. It helps enhance how they perform their work and inspires them to strive for excellence. The book begins with an introduction and an overview of quality, followed by listing and explaining the selected 77 pillars (basic principles, concepts, and tools) of quality, grouped under the themes of quality, Six Sigma, and Lean management. It examines the logical understanding of these pillars and how to implement them, providing practical examples and beneficial real-case studies. The stories are based on the learning and practical experience of the author, a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, a quality manager, and a university lecturer. The book benefits employees, partners, and customers of any organization, offering a great reference for practitioners and academics alike. It serves as a call to reflect on basic quality pillars first, before embarking on a quality-improvement journey. It provides a solid foundation for managers and practitioners to exceed their customers' expectations and excel in managing their business operations.

“Weaves together thoughts, stories, and quotes from top performers in music, business, and sports to help you achieve excellence” (Jeff Janssen, founder and president of the Janssen Sports Leadership Center). Does excellence relentlessly drive you? Does mediocrity constantly bother you? In Working Toward Excellence, Clemson University professor Paul Buyer identifies eight values for achieving excellence in work and life including hunger, effort, process, quality, consistency, leadership, time, and perseverance. Each chapter features inspiring stories, questions, and quotes from respected professionals who have achieved uncommon success in business, sports, education, and the arts such as John Maxwell, Jim Collins, Stephen Covey, John Wooden, Mike Krzyzewski, Wynton Marsalis, Isaac Stern, and many others. Also included is a Working Toward Excellence Evaluation to help you and your organization reach your true potential and further develop, improve, and measure these essential attributes of success. “Working Toward Excellence has captures my attention in a big way. It is filled with valuable and practical information. It will make a major difference in your life.” —Pat Williams, Orlando Magic, senior vice president, author of Leadership Excellence

Organized into more than 200 thought- and action-provoking elements—from the importance of clean trucks and bathrooms to conversations with entrepreneurs creating new markets—Tom Peters, bestselling management guru offers a practical guide to impractical times. In The Pursuit of Wow!, Tom Peters offers readers the words, the tools, to survive in tumultuous business environments. In his groundbreaking book, In Search of Excellence changed the way business does business. Now it’s time to take the next leap into the cyberstage era. Getting to a place called excellence is no longer the idea. You’ve got to take that leap, then leap again—catapult their imaginations, blow their mindsets—in a word, wow! them. Once more the unconventional Peters stimulates corporate thought processes. Along with the best of his columns, Peters includes questions and rebuttals that come from readers and listeners, as well as his own candid responses. A must-read for every business person.

"O'Boyle has researched and written a monumental book that should be mandatory reading for all CEOs and anyone concerned with business ethics." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "Superb . . . a spirited study of General Electric, and of its sometimes brilliant, sometimes bungling, but always ruthless boss, Jack Welch." --Chicago Sun-Times With convincing passion and meticulous research, Thomas F. O'Boyle explores the forces behind General Electric's rise to the top of Wall Street, questioning if GE, with chief executive officer Jack Welch at the helm, is still "bringing good things to life." Welch--explosive, profit-hungry, and pragmatic--catapulted GE's stocks to the top, up 1,155 percent from 1982 to 1997. O'Boyle argues that these astounding results have come only with the heavy price of employees' lives, blighted under the tyranny of "Neutron Jack" Welch, so named for his bomb-like ability to eliminate staff without disturbing surrounding operations. During Welch's reign, hard-nosed success tactics--unblinking downsizing, ruthless acquisition negotiations, and the virtual abandonment of manufacturing in favor of the more glamorous entertainment and financial services industries--coexist with scandals like price-fixing, pollution, and defense contract fraud. Sure to spark controversy, this gripping, comprehensive account begs the greater question: Is Jack Welch's GE a model company for business in the next century, or is it time to change the way the world does business? "Smoothly written and thoroughly researched." --USA Today "This book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of corporate America. . . . Thomas F. O'Boyle persuades you that GE--Jack Welch's GE--brings bad things to life. In abundance." --Washington Monthly

"Today Singapore ranks sixth in the world in healthcare outcomes well ahead of many developed countries, including the United States. The results are all the more significant as Singapore spends less on healthcare than any other high-income country, both as measured by fraction of the Gross Domestic Product spent on health and by costs per person. Singapore achieves these results at less than one-fourth the cost of healthcare in the United States and about half that of Western European countries. Government leaders, presidents and prime ministers, finance ministers and ministers of health, policymakers in congress and parliament, public health officials responsible for healthcare systems planning, finance and operations, as well as those working on healthcare issues in universities and think-tanks should know how this system works to achieve affordable excellence."--Publisher's website.

Excellence Through Equity is an inspiring look at how real-world educators are creating schools where all students are able to thrive. In these schools, educators understand that equity is not about treating all children the same. They are deeply committed to ensuring that each student receives what he or she individually needs to develop their full potential and succeed. To help educators with what can at times be a difficult and challenging journey, Blankstein and Noguera frame the book with five guiding principles of Courageous Leadership: Getting to your core Making organizational meaning Ensuring constancy and consistency of purpose Facing the facts and your fears Building sustainable relationships. They further emphasize that the practices are grounded in three important areas of research that are too often disregarded: (1) child development, (2) neuroscience, and (3) environmental influences on child development and learning. You'll hear from Carol Corbett Burris, Michael Fullan, Marcus J. Newsome, Paul Reville, Susan Szachowicz, and other bold practitioners and visionary thinkers who share compelling and actionable ideas, strategies, and experiences for closing the achievement gap in your classrooms and school. Ensuring that all students receive an education that cultivates their talents and potential is in all our common interest. As Andy Hargreaves writes in the coda: "The opportunity for all Americans is to articulate and believe in an inspiring vision of educational change that is about what the next generation of America and Americans should become, not about a target or ranking that the nation should attain." From the Foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu: "Letting go of a system of winners and losers in favor of what is proposed in this book is a courageous leap forward that we all must take together. Let this bold, practical book be a guide; and may you travel into this new exciting vista, in which every child can succeed."

Can YouLearn to BeHappy? YES . . . according to the teacher of HarvardUniversity’s most popular and life-changingcourse. One out of every five Harvard studentshas lined up to hear Tal Ben-Shahar’sinsightful and inspiring lectures on thatever-elusive state: HAPPINESS. HOW? Grounded in the revolutionary “positive psychology” movement,Ben-Shahar ingeniously combines scientific studies, scholarly research, self-help advice, and spiritual enlightenment. He weaves them together into a set of principles that you can apply to your daily life. Once you open your heart and mind to Happier ’s thoughts, you will feel more fulfilled, more connected . . . and, yes, HAPPIER. “Dr. Ben-Shahar, one of the most popular teachers in Harvard’s recent history, has written a personal, informed, and highly enjoyable primer on how to become happier. It would be wise to take his advice.” --Ellen J. Langer, author of Mindfulness and On Becoming an Artist “This fine book shimmers with a rare brand of good sense that is imbedded in scientific knowledge about how to increase happiness. It is easy to see how this is the backbone of the most popular course at Harvard today." --Martin E. P. Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness