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Managers are people who accomplish tasks through others. For the twenty‐first century, managers should be defined as people who accomplish tasks through their effective use of processes and enablers. This paper defines what the new manager will look like in the twenty‐first century. It is the first of a two‐part paper.

Argues that winners of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the Deming Prize, and the European Quality Award are held up as models of how organizations should be managed. Unfortunately, what may be good for them can be disastrous for your organization. Bases this report on one of the world’s largest international management practice’s database and provides statistically sound conclusions that can change the way you think about best practices, benchmarking, and the way you are managing your organization’s improvement efforts.

The complexity of today’s business environment has made it necessary to evaluate all the alternatives before committing resources to an improvement process. Combines total business management, total cost management, total productivity management, total quality management, and total technology management into a new methodology called total improvement management.

Through the use of total quality management programmes, the industrialised western economies have made great strides in improving quality, reducing waste and increasing productivity. It was our hope that these improvements would recapture our market share, recreating the jobs we lost in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Unfortunately, in many companies, growth in market share has not kept pace with improved productivity. As a result their surplus employee problem continues to grow. This paper discusses how to deal with this situation without massive layoffs.

Unveils the myth that process breakthrough methodologies like business process improvement, process re‐engineering, and process innovation, provide a greater total organizational improvement than continuous improvement methodologies. Also shows how to combine continuous improvement and breakthrough improvement methodologies to maximize the improvement effort.

Examines the past and future of total quality management through observations contributed by senior leaders of the USA quality movement on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the American Society for Quality Control, the 40th anniversary of the European Organization for Quality and the 30th anniversary of the International Academy for Quality.

Initiatives to enhance operational performance can include some programs that strive for continuous improvement and others that attempt radical innovation. But implementation depends upon learning how to integrate the substantially different approaches of total quality management (TQM) and business reengineering.

Outlines the situation regarding European management technology, comparing current systems in Europe with contemporary businesses in Japan and the USA. Discusses in brief the development of management technology in Europe, Japan and America since the end of the Second World War, and stresses the urgency behind the European need to close the gap. Describes some Japanese management practices and explains why Europeans are further behind than the Americans. Suggests that the problem has two faces: corporate required development and self‐development and concludes that European managers must learn to act on their own initiative to increase their managerial know‐how.