"Command and Control is failing us. There is a better way to design and manage work - a better way to make work work - but it remains unknown to the vast majority of managers."

An adherent of the Toyota Production System, John Seddon explains how traditional top-down decision making within service organizations leads to managers who are detached from employees and remote from operations. He demonstrates that decision-making based on purpose-related measures (such as putting customers first and improving services) can help managers reconnect with operations, see waste, and exploit...

In his acclaimed 2008 book Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, John Seddon blew the whistle on public sector 'reform' and the flawed gospel of quasi-markets, competition, targets and inspection. He showed how thousands of people in the UK and elsewhere had been engaged at a cost of millions of pounds, to impose and enforce targets that simply made things worse ...Those people are still there - from the Audit Commission down - and the quasi-market model is still creating waste, driving up costs, damaging services and destroying morale.Now a new book spells out the alternative. Delivering...

Systems Thinking is a topic which is at the forefront of how we think about management in the Public Sector and Service Industries. This collection from leading thinkers in the field takes a case study approach to a variety of issues which encompass topics such as Banking, Electrical Distribution, Manufacturing and Adult Social Care.