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Attention has been increasingly devoted to the development of methods for assessing the quality of care in long‐term care (LTC) facilities, especially for government surveillance. A study is described which used the tracer method to provide data on the quality of care in Israeli LTC institutions. Advantages of the tracer method include its incorporation of structural, process and outcome measures and its focus on a number of representative tracer conditions. The study tested the ability of the tracer method to provide data on the quality of care, and facilitated adoption of this methodology by the government for their annual inspections.

In 1984, IBM was viewed as the most powerful corporation in the world. Ten years later, it was struggling to survive, while what had been an entrepreneurial curiosity—Microsoft—had become so powerful that many were concerned. Today, Microsoft finds itself fighting a rear‐guard action to hold its position in the face of Netscape and other emerging competitors.

Recently, I was asked to be the technical editor for a book that purported to put in one volume all the knowledge gained from an MBA program. Since a typical MBA program requires two full years of study, this was an ambitious undertaking. Always up for a challenge, I decided to give it a look. First, I skimmed through the text. The section that caught my attention, and stopped me for a closer read, was the one on strategic planning.

States that companies are under increased pressure in today′s economic climate to boost the productivity of their marketing operations, since this is often a crucial factor in shareholder wealth and continued market presence. Explains that managing marketing for productivity entails the management of four key areas: strategy management, cost management, asset management and organization management. Concludes that marketers must be more concerned with productivity in order to sustain customer satisfaction, healthy margins and market share in the competitive 1990s.

Avoid the trap of corporate self‐absorption, a top strategy consultant urges.

Discusses how risk managers can improve style and methods of their techniques. Sets out perspectives based on the author’s experiences as a director of Barclays Group and shows how to gain entry to the “top table” of management. Itemizes the four main drivers to make risk management an interesting top table topic; first, directors are concerned with matters of corporate governance; second, top tables are further using a broader “balanced scorecard” to manage the organizations; third, help inform capital debates on the top table and last, a growing interest in “new” areas of risk. Urges opportunities to be seized to accept the coming challenges.

For companies striving towards total quality management and continuous improvement it is important to be sure that employees are receiving the right messages. A new non‐scoring audit tool, developed in work with UK companies, assesses whether human resource policies are integrated with quality management processes.

The aim of the study is to determine the ethical concept of the companies’ statements and correlations with each other. Therefore, content analysis with quantitative methods were applied to the formal and written documents of 192 companies. In addition, corporate characteristics were determined. Consequently, statements were determined in 36 different subject areas. Among these, “high quality production” is the most frequently mentioned subject, while “supplier satisfaction” and “union relations” are the least. Also, “human resources” is the most, while “environmental issues” are the least examined subjects in the context of business functions. Companies’ ethical statements are affected by their year of establishment, the number of personnel, market values and ISO certificates.

Unions are rarely mentioned in the writings of the quality gurus, and the industrial relations aspects of TQM can often be neglected by employers. However, because TQM involves changes in working practices and job control ‐ traditional areas of union concern ‐ industrial relations issues become increasingly important at lower levels in the hierarchy (Wilkinson, 1994). TQM, like much of the prescriptive writing on HRM, is unitarist in approach and is regarded as essentially a management policy, outside the union sphere of influence (Wilkinson, et al, 1992). Collard (1993) concludes that: