Book review of Assessing Business Excellence, 2nd edn, by L. J. PORTER and S. J. TANNER. (Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 2003), x + 451 pp., £24.99 (paperback), ISBN 0 7506 5517 8.

The second edition of L. J. Porter and S. J. Tanner’s text is a one-stop shop for excellence models, and it acts as a handy reference document for those who want to identify the minutiae of the various offerings that have developed across the world. The book also offers models for self-assessment, listing a number of approaches and tips on writing an award submission document. The text encompasses summaries of all of the excellence frameworks one has ever encountered. These form the centrepiece of the book, and address Baldrige, EQA, Deming, ISO 9000, and a number of national and regional quality awards. The present reviewer found these somewhat of a trial to read because there are so many similarities between the various models. And there are few options to presenting them, so there were many tables and lists of bullet points about rather similar issues. Also, there was too much history (e.g. evolution of the Deming award and who won the Canadian Business Excellence award back to 1991) and not enough analysis to compare the relative merits of the various models. Part I presented the case for self-assessment and summarized the ‘pedigree’ of business excellence from TQM to BPR to 6 Sigma. However, it is problematic to support the linkage of a particular approach (in this case, business excellence) to business performance. Many will remember Florida Light and Power, the first company outside Japan to win the Deming award, which later ditched its business excellence approach as being too distracting from the fundamentals of the business! This text is strong on the ‘what’ of business excellence and weak on the ‘how’. This was a pity, because the authors are clearly very active in the area and it would have been helpful to have seen some illustrations of good practice and a few stories to break up the rather dry descriptions.