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...

Focusing on domestic, economic and social policy, Wood examines the influence of academic advisers on presidential decision-making from the Kennedy-Johnson years through the Reagan administration. He considers the recent shift from reliance on knowledge-based advisers to ideological loyalists.