There are a lot of managers out there who have not realized the great advantages of team building. They see themselves rather than their team members as the focal point, the most knowledgeable, and the decision maker. This book does not buy into that philosophy.
Total quality management, now a well known idea, is a philosophy of management for continuously improving the quality of products and processes. The idea is that the quality of products and processes is the responsibility of everyone who is involved with the development and/or use of the products or services. TQM involves management, workforce, suppliers, and even customers, in order to mee…
When the first edition of my book appeared in 1993, quality was a new subject. My prefaces to the first and second editions of this book were aimed at persuading sceptical educationalists to embrace total quality management. I wanted to extol the virtues of TQM and to introduce the world of education to the then somewhat alien concept of quality assurance.
At a time when the United States faces tremendous pressure from global competition, and the voices of external customers are growing louder and stronger, the quest for quality has never been more urgent. The very survival of organizations is acutely in jeopardy. The notion of quality has gone from being a socially provocative one to being a deliberate strategy for long-term viability. In t…
Econometric modelling has long been an integral part of the academic and policy- making scene in Singapore and has contributed in important ways to enhancing our understanding of key relationships and interlinkages in the economy. This in turn has formed the basis for deeper and more valuable discussions of macroeconomic policy issues. Indeed, the practice of econometric modelling has evolved …
where f is the objective function, x represents the decision variables, and Θ is the feasible region or constraint set. All of the chapters with the exception of the final one basically address this problem in some form. As in the deterministic optimization domain, one dichotomy is whether the decision variables are discrete (ordered or unordered, finite or infinite) or continuous, or a mixt…
This book presents the main macroeconomic models used in the central banks of the euro area. These include models of individual countries, multi-country models and aggregate euro-area models. In my view the important contribution of this volume is that it is the first attempt to provide a systematic comparison of these models in terms of their structures, main features and properties. In line w…
In recent years economists have come to realise that social norms and norm-driven behaviour – such as notions of fairness, willingness to be generous towards strangers or cooperate with them, willingness to trust strangers and reciprocate others’ trust – play a crucial role in a variety of economic transactions and have implications for economic theories. There have been a lot of innovati…
We have entered a new era in the evolution of organizational life in which all of us can be agents capable of transforming the direction and flow of events. The immense forces of the technological, societal, and global changes resulted in a variety of new terms and labels that attempted to capture the changing work-life reality: post-industrial society, the information revolution, the postc…
Accordingly, my strong hypothesis going into this research project was that the emphasis on short-term budgetary targets – a pivotal aspect of the slightly clumsy term Reliance on Accounting Performance Measures (RAPM) – is one key barrier to a strong long-term growth orientation of the management at the researched company.