The world of quality management has a problem-it's inundated with improvement techniques that, while helpful to a small minority, are of little help to most managers.

The problem, in part, is the hit-or-miss pattern whereby mangers encounter such systems. Not taught in colleges, improvement techniques usually come to managers through consultants. This is at best a scattergun approach to quality management-some managers receive enough information to benefit their organizations, while others receive insufficient information on which to act-or worse yet, try to act with incomplete and...