Quick Hits: 10 Key Surgical Strike Actions to Improve Business Performance.Quick Hits: 10 Key Surgical Strike Actions to Improve Business Performance. By Kelvin F. Cross. Amacom. 274 pages. $27.95 TQM (Total Quality Management) An organizational undertaking to improve the quality of manufacturing and service. It focuses on obtaining continuous feedback for making improvements and refining existing processes over the long term. See ISO 9000. , Six Sigma Not to be confused with Sigma 6. Six Sigma is a set of practices originally developed by Motorola to systematically improve processes by eliminating defects.[1] A defect is defined as nonconformity of a product or service to its specifications. , reengineering: all are time-honored and sometimes wonderfully effective ways to change a company for the better. But as Kelvin Cross petals out, such earthshaking earth·shak·ing adj. Of great consequence or importance. earth  shak initiatives may be too massive and destabilizing in cases where only small changes in individual departments are needed. Hence a list of 10 "quick hits" for process, improvement Centered around simple but critical notions (among them "eliminate work." "reclaim lost time," "redistribute re·dis·trib·ute tr.v. re·dis·trib·ut·ed, re·dis·trib·ut·ing, re·dis·trib·utes To distribute again in a different way; reallocate. the work" and "show the results"), the book tackles each idea in a chapter, bringing in examples from Cross' consulting practice at Corporate Renaissance Inc. a business process design firm. The book uses a lot of first- and second-person voice (I and we) to help personalize its message, as well as a host of charts and bold-faced sections to reinforce key ideas. The writing is clean and instructive, and Cross offers a recap at the end of every chapter to summarize its content.. There does seem to be a bit of overlap in some sections, seemingly forced by the mandate to get to 10 "hits." But that's little more than a quibble QUIBBLE. A slight difficulty raised without necessity or propriety; a cavil. 2. No justly eminent member of the bar will resort to a quibble in his argument. . Ouick Hits provides an assured, reasoned approach to improving business processes and the resulting performance without forcing seismic change. |
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