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Total quality management has become an important issue in many public and private sector organizations. This may provide hope that training may be taken seriously in Britain, Many organizations’ competitiveness is seriously damaged by the lack of training, even though many experts advocate comprehensive training to be the foundation on which essential improvement programmes should be built. A survey of small/medium‐sized manufacturing firms in the North of England showed that attitude to training has been short‐sighted and only a small percentage of firms have adopted a total quality management strategy within their organizations. Fully explores the survey results.

Organisations can become sick, just as people do. A great deal about the nature, diagnosis and treatment of organisational maladies can be learned from a study of how individuals can become mentally ill. The diagnosis and treatment of mental illness is much more advanced than the study of organisational ills. Like people, organisations can be structurally sick or behaviourally sick. The various “symptoms” can be studied, hopefully, within a diagnostic framework that would enable an accurate diagnosis to be made and treatments prescribed to bring about a healthy, productive and successful organisation. The implications of these ideas are that HRM directors in the next millennium should take the lead in organisational diagnosis and be the guardians of the organisation’s medicine chest!

Provides a contribution to the debate in the UK on the appropriateness of competence‐based qualifications. Identifies a number of weaknesses in the competence philosophy as currently defined, and a number of operational problems in implementing a national scheme of competence‐based vocational qualifications. Argues that the change to competence qualifications is unlikely to bring benefits commensurate with the required investment, and that the approach will be unworkable for higher level professional and managerial jobs. The first in a series of three, which is intended to stimulate critical debate within the education and training professions. The series will end with recommendations on a way forward within the established NCVQ framework.

At a recent conference sponsored by the Center for Creative Leadership, the following remark was overheard, “I was away from leadership for 15 years, and when I returned, I felt that I have been gone for 15 minutes.”