By almost every measure manufacturing quality has improved tremendously in the past decade; unfortunately, the same is not true for service. Yet, manufacturing processes represent less than 5 per cent of all business processes. Clearly, the opportunity area for the twenty‐first century is in the...

Suggests that organizational improvement methodologies have a life cycle. This takes them through the stages of being the “in” thing to do, then into a decline because they are no longer exciting or have failed to produce results. Ultimately they are left being pursued by only a few...