Books for studying quality management

“Be more careful” can be a reasonable request and an incomplete account of a quality problem. Preparation, resources, information and management decisions shape the work people are trying to perform. If you want to study quality, look at management’s part in the work as well as the finished result.

These selections offer an owner’s experience, a sustained management argument and a professional handbook. I would choose by the form of study you want: understanding the operating conditions, examining a philosophy or pursuing a reference across the quality discipline.

1. Infinite Upside — Vijay Sheth

   Start with the conditions behind the service. Chapter 3 describes restaurant work in which a customer encounters the combined result of several people’s actions. Preparation, stock and the placement of staff matter before the final handoff. The employee receiving a complaint may be far from where the problem began.

   The later owner’s reflection gives the passage its weight. A company can praise someone for coping while remaining uninterested in the recurring difficulty that makes coping necessary.

   This is why Infinite Upside is my first recommendation here. It gives the management question a human operating setting. Imagine a service business asking employees to check work carefully while the agreed specification keeps changing without reaching them. That is an illustrative reading situation, not a new case attributed to the memoir.

   Read for the owner’s part in making good work possible. The book does not present a quality-management system, a statistical control method or a certification claim.

2. Out of the Crisis — W. Edwards Deming

   Choose this to examine a management philosophy. MIT Press’s 2018 reissue presents Deming’s theory of management and its concern with people, processes, resources and longer-term planning. It is a sustained argument about how management should change, rather than a collection of quick quality tips.

   Investigate Deming when you want to question the managerial assumptions surrounding repeated difficulties. The fictional business might be ready to examine why improving work has become an instruction issued to staff rather than a responsibility management studies.

   The management argument is deliberately broad. That is part of its appeal and its tradeoff if you want a reference for a specific technical topic. Read it as a philosophy to examine, not as proof that every existing practice is wrong or that adopting a named approach guarantees improvement.

   The reissue date does not make this a newly written theory. Keep its historical setting visible when considering how its argument relates to your company.

3. Juran’s Quality Handbook, seventh edition — Joseph A. DeFeo, editor

   Choose this for professional reference study. The subtitle is The Complete Guide to Performance Excellence. McGraw Hill’s selected seventh edition was published in October 2016 with a 2017 copyright. Its public contents span planning, improvement, control, assurance and organizational roles.

   This is a different reading commitment from following one management argument. Consider the handbook when you can name a quality subject you want to investigate and want a broad professional reference in which to locate it.

   Its breadth makes choosing a starting question useful. An owner seeking to understand the responsibilities around quality may begin with a different subject from a specialist pursuing statistical study. The contents let those readers assess the scope before taking on the volume.

   Its treatment of standards and regulation belongs to the selected edition’s setting. A reference published in 2016 does not establish today’s applicable requirements. Nor does the title certify that the fictional business’s work meets its customers’ needs.

Choose the quality study

Begin with the conditions of the work, Deming’s management argument or a professional handbook. If the immediate question is an omitted step or confusing action, use the routine-work selection. For learning after an error, use the organizational-learning selection.