This is a management oriented book about efficiency, quality and effectiveness designed for an audience of management practitioners, scholars, and students. The integrative approach developed in this book contains new ideas regarding quality and efficiency-based effective management. These ideas lend themselves to managerial applications. This work is not meant to provide an exhaustive account of the measurement, and applications of effectiveness, quality, and efficiency concepts. With the exception of the treatment of conventional productivity concepts and measurements in Chapter 2, and of production flexibility in Chapter 5, the discussion in this book is largely non-teclmical. Among management practitioners, the book may be of particular interest to managers with broad strategic orientations in the fields of production management, quality management, marketing, and management of human resources. The academic audience is likely to include scholars and students interested in strategic planning, applied productivity analysis, quality management, marketing management, and management of human resources. The book could also be used as a supplementary text to or part of the readings in basic and advanced courses in strategic management, production management, and quality management. Concepts and dimensions of efficiency, quality, and effectiveness, as used throughout this book, are introduced in Chapter 1. The intricate sets of relationships among effectiveness, quality, and efficiency are explored.

Realization of productivity gains is a necessary condition for long-term consistent improvement in economic well being. We have to work smarter and produce more efficiently to attain an ever higher quantity and quality of goods and services without sacrificing leisure. This is true for the economy at large as well as for individual firms. In a competitive environment, businesses must continuously improve the productivity of their operations in order to sustain and augment profitability and growth. This basic requirement may be temporarily obscured by unexpected external developments or financial manipulations, but it is nevertheless essential to the long-term health of any economic enterprise. Increasing awareness of the importance of productivity has recently motivated renewed interest in the development and refinement of productivity-based management techniques. The purpose of this book is to review and evaluate some of the new contributions in this area. The analysis of productivity-based management in this book encompasses planning, decision making and control methods which explicitly incorporate techniques designed to measure, monitor, induce and improve underlying productivity performance in production, financial planning, marketing and international operations. These productivity-based methods can easily accommodate built-in efficiency incentives designed to motivate people vii viii PRODUCTIVITY BASED MANAGEMENT working in decentralized organizations toward goal congruent behavior. It is argued throughout the book that productivity-based management, at its best, is likely to improve significantly the efficiency and effectiveness of economic enterprises.

This is a management oriented book about efficiency, quality and effectiveness designed for an audience of management practitioners, scholars, and students. The integrative approach developed in this book contains new ideas regarding quality and efficiency-based effective management. These ideas lend themselves to managerial applications. This work is not meant to provide an exhaustive account of the measurement, and applications of effectiveness, quality, and efficiency concepts. With the exception of the treatment of conventional productivity concepts and measurements in Chapter 2, and of production flexibility in Chapter 5, the discussion in this book is largely non-teclmical. Among management practitioners, the book may be of particular interest to managers with broad strategic orientations in the fields of production management, quality management, marketing, and management of human resources. The academic audience is likely to include scholars and students interested in strategic planning, applied productivity analysis, quality management, marketing management, and management of human resources. The book could also be used as a supplementary text to or part of the readings in basic and advanced courses in strategic management, production management, and quality management. Concepts and dimensions of efficiency, quality, and effectiveness, as used throughout this book, are introduced in Chapter 1. The intricate sets of relationships among effectiveness, quality, and efficiency are explored.