Harnessing human resources to achieve business excellence

The authors address the failure of companies to reach a sufficiently mature stage of quality required to be truly competitive and to exhibit the characteristics of so‐called “excellent companies”. The authors set out to answer some hard questions identified during their research: for instance, why is it that companies know what they should be doing but fail to do it? Why is it that barriers to progress fail to be overcome? Why is there such a large gap between management theory and practice? Five themes emerge which offer a means of exploring these issues in greater depth in order to develop a way of resolving them: competitiveness ‐ the challenges faced by industry today; current “state of the art” strategic quality management ‐ where are we?; the learning organisation; the role of self‐assessment frameworks; performance management system approaches.