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The authors share the observations of a combined 70 years of consultation with organizations, and input from tens of thousands of worldwide employees, to explore conventional barriers encountered in the work environment and how to “break‐out‐of‐the‐box” to find more creative solutions to organizational problems.

Narrative based on over 70 years of consultation with organizations on a wide variety of related managerial subjects.

Certain behaviors must precede any attempts to create a fulfilling, stimulating, and freedom‐to‐think, creative work environment. Formulation and fulfillment of a psychological contract, especially on the part of the organization's leaders – but also including employees – seems to be an effective process for the development of an open, healthy climate which is encouraging and conducive to the development of creativity. In the larger view of the organization, such freedom which comes from clear understanding and expression of expectations within the company significantly increases its transparency. With increased clarity of understanding of the work environment and supportive leadership, employees will go beyond the job minimums and offer creative, “out‐of‐the‐box” contributions.

A creative new look at an old but very critical subject.

No one would argue that leaders have a myriad of significant responsibilities. Using a premise the authors support – leadership is a people business – they aim to utilize their more than 100 years combined leadership to answer the question: what, then, is the real work of the leader?

Narrative based on over 100 years of leadership and consultation on leadership with a wide variety of organizations.

The result is the eight roles of the leader, which are as follows: collaborative developer of mission, vision, and organizational core values; creator of a humanistic work environment; developer of people, builder of capabilities; Initiator of organization‐wide communications; role model of emotional intelligence; utilizer of strategic data; consensus seeker – risk taker; change agent.

The paper discusses each of the roles of the leader in some detail, using a model developed for this purpose. The paper does not attempt to deal with the production, product quality, financial, etc. responsibilities of the leader, only what the authors feel is the principal focus of leadership – the people.

The authors are leaders with over 100 years combined leadership experience. Some are leading theorists and practitioners as well. Defining exactly what is leadership has been a persistent problem for researchers and theorists. Discovering how to create or produce leaders likewise has been a difficult challenge over the years. This paper provides a model that encompasses both challenges to answer the fundamental question, what is the real work of the leader?

During difficult economic times the media often highlight examples of failing or failed business organizations. In some cases the demise of corporations is examined in considerable detail often resulting in the following take‐home messages: these are the sins that have brought about your failure; and if things had been done differently you might still be a viable company. This paper aims to point out success stories from creative leaders who successfully navigated through challenging environments.

The paper draws on existing cases from the literature highlighting leaders who led their organizations to positive ends during turbulent times.

There are opportunities for company success despite difficult business environments.

It is rare to read about successful leadership practices during turbulent times. Yet, they do exist. The overwhelming number of examples and cases written about, however, are indeed in the negative direction, not the positive.

TQM philosophy is that continuous improvement within an organization is possible. It is people‐oriented and customer focused. To be successful it must involve all people within the organization and must have customer feedback. Discusses in detail the reasons why this fails: managers do not delegate quality to involve everyone in the organization; appropriate consultants to implement the system are not evaluated properly; lack of employee involvement; failure of management leadership with too much emphasis on cost cutting and profits, not customer service; poor communication with workforce; resistance to change. Benchmarking must be established to measure the effects of TQM and a long‐term plan to establish goals. A good supplier relationship, teamwork and employee participation are all required concepts within a successful TQM programme.

Job losses that are the result of mergers, sale of a company, restructuring, and downsizing as organizations struggle for profitability in a highly competitive corporate world are common. The reduction process forces organizations to employ a variety of exit strategies as they deal with the most difficult aspect of downsizing – the reduction of personnel from their organization as a means of rapid reduction of expense to the company. Considers some employee‐sensitive exit strategies.

This paper broadens and extends the idea of organizational death by arguing that certain organizational site moves, those in which employees hold a strong place attachment to the to be left, are a form of organizational death. It argues for the utility of viewing organizational change as involving loss and including space in studies of everyday organizational experiences. Using ethnographic research (participant‐observation and in‐depth interviews with the employees) of one such organization (the “Coffee House”) and a negotiated‐order perspective, discusses employee beliefs as to how the site move should have been managed as a means to document their understanding of the move as a loss experience and as a form of organizational death.

This special issue of Personnel Review on “Quality and the Individual” is very different in style from the editor‐generated issues of this journal, but it has been designed for a very particular purpose. In the rush towards the achievement of high levels of “quality” among organizations, however this is manifested, the effects on the individual have largely gone unnoticed. We are all aware of the high rates of failure among quality management initiatives, and what is becoming clear is that successful organizations are harnessing the talents of individuals, whatever their status, to the quality cause from its very early stages.