OUTLINE and SAMPLES of "In Search of Quality I"       QUALITY Art Posters

GENERAL INTRODUCTION: to.....

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388 pages long, this extremely well-organized and conversationally-written text breaks down the Quality Management movement to ten central Principles and eighteen main Mechanisms.  

Both THEORY (about 100 pages) and PRACTICAL APPLICATION (about 300 pages) are extensively addressed and illustrated through many specific, real-life examples.  This book also benefits from many illustrations and figures where key concepts are extracted and crystallized.  

Quality Management is taken from the Senior Executive business level, and extended down to the individual "regular" person working at his/her desk, dealing with a family, working in a volunteer group such as a Church group, in school situations, and in one's personal life.    

The AIM of this book is to describe how your personal understanding and implementation of Quality Principles and Mechanisms can make your own life, family, church group, school-situation, volunteer organization, or job-situation easier, more productive, and more enjoyable.

See below for General Introduction.

[and Quality Section for Outline and Samples.]

The AIM of this book is to describe how understanding and implementing Quality Principles and Mechanisms can make your personal life, family, church group, school-situation, volunteer organization, or job-situation easier, more productive, and more enjoyable.  

I am not implying that you as a father or mother or kid or church-member or religious-leader or student or teacher or administrator or volunteer or organizer or employee or supervisor or manager or top-executive are doing a bad job.

Quite the contrary, I suspect that you indeed are doing a very good job---under the circumstances.  But you are limited and constrained in what you can do because of the system you are within.

So please don't read any of the sections of this book on Quality Principles or Quality Mechanisms as trying to beat you up!  Instead, read them as they are intended: aggressively beating up the System.

The Message of this book is very simple: CHANGE THE SYSTEM to have a focus on real Quality, and everybody will win.  Your Core Values and Objectives will be better met!  The talents of your employees will be better used!   Your Customers will be better served!  Your organization will enjoy greater success!

Over and over again, throughout this book, I will beat up the System.  I will beat up self-destructive behaviors, dysfunctional families, schools that claim to help kids learn but mainly cause them trauma and torture, religious congregations where tradition is put above core principles, volunteer groups where generous donations of time/talent are spurned, and product/service-producing organizations where command and control kills the innovation and enthusiasm of the employees.  I will beat-up those types of Systems thoroughly, specifically, and repeatedly!

And I will have particular praise and sympathy for those ordinary people struggling to do their best under difficult situations, caught-up in the prevailing System, who richly deserve some sort of great AWARD for doing as well as they are under sometimes intolerable conditions.  Yes, you deserve great credit for your heroic struggle.  This book is AIMed at giving you more knowledge and better tools with which to fight your good fight! 

You don't have to be the Top Executive of some multi-national corporation to understand and benefit from Quality Principles and Mechanisms (though they are certainly applicable even at such pinnacles of success).  You the ordinary, regular person struggling to do your best for your own health, your family, your religious congregation, your volunteer group, your own learning/teaching, and your job can greatly benefit from a focus on Quality!

I have great sympathy and praise---and this book is focused on----individuals fighting terrible personal problems, kids with abusive/absent parents, parents with rebellious unappreciative kids, spouses with self-centered mates, kids being taught that learning is rote-memorization for standardized tests, teachers forced to shovel in mountains of facts into their students---teaching a mile wide and an inch deep---with no time allowed to stimulate true learning, school administrators forced by legislatures to compete for funds on rote-memory national tests, members of religious congregations who persist faithfully in exercising their faith in spite of  restrictive church leaders, church leaders trying to make good decisions while unknowingly trapped in a competition business-meeting mode rather than working from true cooperation, preachers who honestly think (and were taught that way in preacher schools) that "preaching the word" means to constantly beat-up their congregation rather than build up the members starting from their real strengths, volunteers who persist even though they are insulted and slapped-down for their efforts, organizers who keep struggling at good causes even though their innovative efforts are rejected by the larger System around them, front-line workers that band together to serve their customers well even though they are penalized by their organization for doing such, supervisors and mid-level managers that establish an oasis of mutual respect even though the organization fights against them, and Top-Level Executives that struggle to change entire Systems steeped in tradition, inertia, suspicion, and self-interest.

To all-of-the-above, I say there is hope!  There are excellent, good, productive ways that you can fight the System---and make things better for everyone!

The key is in understanding and knowing how to most-effectively use...Quality Principles and Mechanisms.

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The first thing I'd like to make clear is that I'm not claiming to be an expert in Quality.  I am just like you: a person trying to do his best, learn from his mistakes, and hopefully do better in the future.  I have found that Quality is one of several powerful concepts in my own personal pursuit of Significance, and hope that some of the things I've learned might be of use to you as well.

This book is not the last word on Quality.  Its merely my present, personal take on the topic of Quality.  That does not necessarily mean the things I say are wrong, just that there's always more to any subject that can be learned.  I acknowledge up-front that I'm not giving you the last word on Quality.

I personally anticipate deepening and extending my views on the subject of Quality beyond what I write in this present book.  Hopefully you also will take this book as either a starting point---if you've not encountered the topic before---or as an interesting supplement to your present knowledge.

You should to take everything I say with a grain of salt, applying your own good thinking and standards to decide what's useful to you.  If some of the points are helpful and useful to you, great.  If not, tear them out and throw them in the trash.

In like manner, Quality is not a religion.  I am not advocating this as some sort of Great Philosophy of Life.  It's merely an excellent way to manage situations involving people, products, and services---nothing more.

Finally, I'm not writing this book to give you a history or referenced analysis of the Quality Movement.  I will briefly give you a few necessary points for orientation purposes, but that's it.  You can go to other excellent works for those types of discussions.  What I'm interested in here is understanding fundamental concepts of Quality, and applying them to real situations that you and I encounter everyday.

In that vein, there are some areas of Quality that may not be represented here at all, and some which are only briefly touched upon (such as statistical data analysis methods).  My main interest is in how you and I can apply Quality Principles and Mechanisms to enhance our interactions with other people---be it at your job, at school, in a volunteer organization, in your family, or in your personal life.

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From my sometimes-rocky Quality-experience, I conclude that it's possible for us all to apply Quality Principles to the space that we control: be it at our desk at our regular job, or for an organizational unit we may head up, or where we interact with other people at our places of worship, or in our families, or in our personal conduct with other people.

Whether or not we can convince the powers that be to allow a broader implementation is questionable.  However, it's worth a respectful, polite, creative, gentle attempt---especially if we can propose implementation in ways, places, or times that don't conflict with established tradition!  

If nothing more, your continued example just by itself may wear off on others.

Why persist?  Why not just lay back, take it easy, and try to not get too excited about the prevailing state of affairs?  After all, things are not going all that badly.  The job's getting done.  The organization's surviving.  The Church continues.  The Family is still together.  You're still alive.  What's the big deal?

The big deal is as follows: 

1) getting the most out of life rather than the minimal;

2) achieving the highest level possible of personal satisfaction;

3) not just surviving but thriving;

4) having a vibrant, exciting Church (or other volunteer organization) rather than a dull, boring ritual you struggle through;

5) having a Family that's tightly bound together rather than reluctantly aligned;

6) not having to leave the major and best part of you at home when you go to your job;

7) getting the greatest possible customer acknowledgment/praise/enthusiasm in validating the worth of what you do; and

8) having fun at the same time that we work at the same time that we learn!

I've been given two great Church-related compliments in my life: 1) that I have the gift of clarity, and 2) that I make Church fun.

Both of those great achievements---of which I am very proud---are largely based on my understanding and implementation of Quality.

In Search of Quality Art Posters

Outline and Samples to In Search of Quality      QUALITY Art Posters

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