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Hourly workers see TQM as a threat. Management sees it as a corporate savior. Can the two sides find common ground?

Non‐profits have to make money—lots of it, in fact. And there's lots to learn from the creative strategy, planning, and marketing these concerns employ.

IT READS LIKE A BAD JOKE: HOW MANY STEPS DOES IT TAKE TO MOVE A water cooler? If you worked at Florida Power & Light three years ago, your answer would have been: It takes seven separate steps. Sound ludicrous? Maybe, but that's exactly how a team at FP&L's Fort Myers' district office approached the situation when someone proposed moving the water cooler.

U.S. corporations spend about $22 billion a year on therapy for employees—including counseling for senior strategists. Here's a look at what this new tool is doing in the executive suite.

Ginger Conwell isn't the type of teacher that the second graders at George Washington Carver Elementary School in Santa Ana, California, are used to. For one thing, she's an engineer—a female engineer—one who plans and coordinates multimillion‐dollar graphic‐systems projects. And, before launching into today's lesson on airplane flight, she tells them, “You don't have to take notes. If you don't learn anything, that's okay.”

The double life of Les Bridges begins when he wakes at 5:00 a.m. After gulping a mug of tea, he'll don a sweatsuit, plop a Detroit Tigers baseball cap on his head, and amble down the stairs of his brownstone apartment. For the next hour or so, the 55‐year‐old executive will wander the streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side, jotting down images that catch his attention: rats scampering among garbage cans; a bleary‐eyed customer at a Kinko's Copy Shop; a man smoking crack on Avenue A.

The movement to benchmark best practices long ago crossed industry lines, but the strange, hybrid results can still startle the outside observer. Take the issue of how to deal with a client spending time on hold when telephoning a company. Unbelievably, in this age of technology, some corporations still put people on hold and leave them there—in silence.