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Details the increasing reliance on IT within organisations and its relationship to “world‐class quality”. Suggests IT is used to help automate tasks but can play a vital role in human resource management. Examines how IT can be used to help recruit and retain employees by matching their skills to the appropriate job, beyond simply record‐keeping. Highlights ways a personnel system can be used to advantage in mapping out careers, health and safety and performance.

The aim of quality is meeting your customer's requirements. With its six point strategy, however, Corning is aiming to go beyond that and ‘delight’ its customers.

This article represents a personal view of the changing role of the librarian in today's ‘high tech’ age and attempts to identify the type of skills required for a ‘modern’ librarian. It then attempts to identify the effect of technologies upon the library support staff and what levels of support are required to make a modern library function. This will highlight the growing need for trained and skilled staff in areas such as office software, Internet awareness and local area networking. It then attempts to explain how librarians, support staff and users are at odds with each other and identifies significant factors that require to be addressed if libraries of the future are to provide the services demanded of them. The conclusions are that as technology evolves the demands upon librarians and support staff increase exponentially. While technologies such as the WWW improve the quantity of information available, there is a requirement for greater skills in information and resource management. Crucially these resources include people.

Creating a new agenda to return American businesses to the fore‐front of worldwide competition requires nothing less than the reinvention of the corporation and a new style of leadership. Today there is evidence of real change; I think such change will continue unabated but on an unpredictable course. We do not know what specific changes will take place, but we know some facts that can shape a response to those that do occur:

Corning's CEO shares lessons the company has learned while managing over 40 joint ventures—with only a handful of failures—in the last 60 years.

Appearing at The Planning Forum's 1992 International Conference, was a “faculty” that included many of America's most respected strategic thinkers. They urged attendees to take daring steps into strategic management's wild beyond:

Quality cost systems have evolved from a purely manufacturing defect related cost reporting system that reflected the limited quality thinking of the 1940s to a poor‐quality cost system that reflects the total process quality orientation of the 1990s. The new poor‐quality cost system includes both the direct and indirect quality cost. It addresses key concepts like customer encore cost, lost opportunity cost and non‐value added cost. The focus of the poor‐quality cost system has drifted away from the manufacturing process and now focuses on the total business systems that represent today’s biggest opportunity for improvement. Poor‐quality cost in functions like marketing and sales can exceed 100 percent of the organization’s total budget. This paper explains how quality costs hav evolved to keep up with the quality systems’ evolution over the past 50 years.

As competitive pressures increase, top‐level managers in many companies have recognized the need to rebuild initiative, creativity, and drive in the front‐line units of their organizations. Under the banner of “inverting the pyramid,” they delayered and destaffed, and invested significant amounts of money and management time to cascade the message of empowerment throughout their companies. Yet, in most instances, after the dust settled, they found that how the company functioned did not change because the behaviors of its people did not change.

Many executives contend that creating value for shareholders is the primary objective of management. But in focusing so strongly on the bottom line, have US firms neglected the customer?

During the past decade, the environment for multinational corporations has been quite volatile, with numerous challenges for the firms operating in this arena. However, throughout this period there have emerged a number of executive leaders who have been recognized for their contributions to organizational excellence and leadership despite the environmental fluctuations. An analysis of the strategies followed by these executives reflects a limited number of distinct themes. The themes reflect a focus on the care of customers, product innovation, committed people and management leadership. The leadership strategies reflected by these corporate leaders focus on attention through vision, meaning through communication, trust through positioning and confidence through respect. This article focuses on the top multinational executives identified for each year during the decade of the 1990s, and the organizational excellence and leadership strategies that have been at the heart of the practices implemented and followed by these executives.