One of the best overall business improvement book ever

books:


	• Total Improvement Management: The Next Generation in Performance Improvement H. James Harrington, James S. Harrington McGraw-Hill, 1994 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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One of the best overall business improvement book ever

I'm wondering why this book only has one reader (now two) rating it 5 stars.

I've read scores of books about business improvement but most if not all of them focus only in one knowledge area, e.g., The Goal/Question/Metric
Method; Operational Performance Measurement: Increasing Total Productivity; Real Process Improvement Using the CMMI, and others.

I'm still on page 216 as of August 22, 2007 but I don't have to wait to finish this book to say that it's good. The author is the kind of person that leaves no doubt that he knows what he's talking about because I've experienced the same situations - positive and negative - he described in the book. For example, we had a former president who wanted us to be assessed at CMMI Level 2 because it will attract more customers. When he found out how much it would costs, CMMI suddenly slowly became history and we had to find another way to 'improve' which costs less or at no cost (Hello?). In page 187, he actually listed the reasons why organizations get certified (assessed or whatever) and my above example is #3, market advantage.

Most important of all is that he doesn't take an atomistic but rather a holistic approach to business improvement. He stressed the cliche, 'a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.' All the good intentions in the world like 5S can fall like a deck of cards when just one manager's desk looks like a garbage dump.

I only have one complaint though and it's about the book's reference to an article written in Wall Street about China shooting 18 factory managers and workers for shipping poor quality refrigerators. I Googled for it and it seems it was just a prank or hoax article similar to the North Korean's leader destroying the moon. I understand that this book was written in 1995 and it was probably an honest mistake to believe the article was factual. But this doesn't take away from my 5-star rating.

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Making Sense out of Improvement Initiatives

Harrington does an excellent job of presenting a methodology to understand how all of those improvement 'flavors-of-the-month' can actually work TOGETHER to obtain that rosetta stone business strives for - synergy - in seeking improvement. The book is very well written, easy to understand, and will serve well as both a strategy book and a reference to keep handy when one more 'initiative' arises the next month. Well worth the money. His work makes sense out of improvement intiatives.

Readers will get spectacular results by following Harrington's basic principles and step-by-step plan for achieving total improvement management. First, he shows how to integrate the four competing methodologies of total technology management, total quality management, total productivity management, and total cost management. Balancing each of these factors results in solid business decisions on where to spend limited resources to ensure long-term results. Next, he puts his total improvement management (TIM) pyramid into action in 15 steps that illustrate how to: Obtain upper management commitment and participation; Construct a strong business plan; Develop a customized 3-year improvement plan out of a clear vision statement; Establish process improvement teams; Upgrade systems to prevent problems before they occur; Motivate through employee recognition programs; And more! Armed with these tools, managers will be able to coordinate the many, often conflicting, improvement efforts going on in today's organizations--thereby achieving total improvement management and renewed customer loyalty. It's a goal that American business can't afford to miss, especially in today's highly competitive global marketplace.

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