Managing Quality Fads: How America Learned to Play the Quality Game

An author who has been writing about Japanese and American quality movements for over twenty years, Robert E. Cole began studying Japanese practices in the mid-1970s and then looked at how these practices were--or were not--adopted by U.S. firms in the 1980s. As a consultant to Fortune 500 companies he has witnessed first-hand the progress of corporate efforts to respond to the Japanese challenge. In 1993 he was inducted into the International Academy of Quality, whose membership is limited to 20 North American experts and 60 members worldwide. He is the editor of The Death and Life of the American Quality Movement (Oxford University Press, 1995). He is Professor of Business Administration and Sociology, and Laura Tyson Mitchell II Professor of Leadership and Communication, in the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.