They concern management practices that at some point emerge and become popular, such as the old Total Quality Management, ISO9000 system or SixSigma.

FORBES: Management myths

Total Quality Management (TQM, ) Continuous Improvement (CI, ) and Six Sigma programs all have been glorified by companies hoping to improve product or service quality.

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The journey might begin to look a lot like Hoshin-Kanri planning, which is a planning approach originating from the Total Quality Management movement.

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The former boss of Coca-Cola's Mexican operation, whose 58th birthday fell on election day, talks of infusing government with total quality management and tracking it with performance indicators.

ECONOMIST: Happy birthday, Se?or Fox

Even Joseph Juran, one of the two American post-war germinators of the quality idea (the other was W. Edwards Deming), considered that quality circles were pretty useless if the company's management was not trained in the more general principles of total quality management.

ECONOMIST: Idea

What Mr Welch cared about was quality hence his embrace of the Six Sigma programme for total-quality management.

ECONOMIST: Online, straight from the gut and politically incorrect

This study, published in Personnel Psychology, compares two groups of activities that aim to increase company productivity: those related to human resources, such as training and teamwork, and those related to operational management, such as just-in-time production and total-quality management.

ECONOMIST: What's in the journals, September 2008

Yet the real reason for fading fads is not that executives have built into their everyday activities such now-familiar ideas as core competences and total-quality management.

ECONOMIST: Management fashion