Based on a profoundly important six-year study by the Center for the Quality of Management (CQM), "Integrated Management Systems" shows how successful organizations accomplish something unbelievably powerful: Creating their own particular ways of executing the scientific method. The authors worked with the cooperation of some of America's largest companies - Teradyne, Hewlett-Packard, Eastman Chemical, Ritz-Carlton -- and of non-profit organizations including top hospitals and the U.S. Navy. They were surprised to find how radically successful systems differed from one organization to the...

This book draws on an untraditional NASA program called the Learning Through Stories Project, which addressed the performance of government projects. The goal of the Project and the book is to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, so that readers can incorporate the accounts and experiences of the professionals involved into their own work. Drawing on more than 75 such stories, the authors provide hands-on solutions in a narrative style which acts as a self-training tool.