High Reliability Management


Book Description

High Reliability Management is the first book to provide an in-depth and timely look at the people who manage for high reliability--professionals who run critical systems in electricity, water, and transportation. The book tells of the extraordinary challenges that these "reliability professionals" face in ensuring that society's basic systems operate continuously and safely, even in the wake of errors in policy and technical design.




High Reliability Management


Book Description

High Reliability Management is the first book to provide an in-depth and timely look at the people who manage for high reliability--professionals who run critical systems in electricity, water, and transportation. The book tells of the extraordinary challenges that these "reliability professionals" face in ensuring that society's basic systems operate continuously and safely, even in the wake of errors in policy and technical design.




Organizing for Reliability


Book Description

Increasingly, scholars view reliability—the ability to plan for and withstand disaster—as a social construction. However, there is a tendency to evoke this concept only in the face of catastrophes, such as the British Petroleum oil spill or the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. This book frames reliability as a fundamental issue in the study of organizations—one that can also improve day-to-day operations. Bringing together a diverse cast of contributors, it considers how we can account for the ability of some organizations to maintain high reliability and what we can learn from them. The chapters distinguish reliability from related lines of inquiry; take stock of relevant research from different disciplinary perspectives; highlight implications for practice; and identify directions, questions, and priorities for future research. The first of its kind in over twenty years, this volume delivers a dynamic base of shared knowledge and an integrative research agenda at a time when organizational reliability has never been so important.







Reliability and Risk


Book Description

The safe and continued functioning of critical infrastructures—such as electricity, natural gas, transportation, and water—is a social imperative. Yet the complex connections between these systems render them increasingly precarious. Furthermore, though we depend so heavily on interconnected infrastructures, we do not fully understand the risks involved in their failure. Emery Roe and Paul R. Schulman argue that designs, policies, and laws often overlook the knowledge and experiences of those who manage these systems on the ground—reliability professionals who have vital insights that would be invaluable to planning. To combat this major blind spot, the athors construct a new theoretical perspective that reveals how to make sense of complex interconnected networks and improve reliability through management, regulation, and political leadership. To illustrate their approach in action, they present a multi-year case study of one of the world's most important "infrastructure crossroads," the San Francisco Bay-Delta. Reliability and Risk advances our understanding of what it takes to ensure the dependability of the intricate—and sometimes hazardous—systems on which we rely every day.




Leading High-Reliability Organizations in Healthcare


Book Description

This book details the attributes and practices that help high-reliability organizations (HROs) excel in the service they provide to their customers. Explaining what it takes to achieve high reliability in healthcare settings, it presents proven tools and concepts that leading healthcare organizations are using to improve safety and quality. The book identifies the necessary infrastructure, methods, and analytics required to achieve and sustain higher reliability. It also includes case studies that illustrate success stories and failures, so readers can avoid making the same mistakes.




Dirty Rotten Strategies


Book Description

Discusses how and why organizations and special interest groups of all kinds attempt to solve the wrong problems with intricate solutions.




Quality and Reliability Management and Its Applications


Book Description

Integrating development processes, policies, and reliability predictions from the beginning of the product development lifecycle to ensure high levels of product performance and safety, this book helps companies overcome the challenges posed by increasingly complex systems in today’s competitive marketplace. Examining both research on and practical aspects of product quality and reliability management with an emphasis on applications, the book features contributions written by active researchers and/or experienced practitioners in the field, so as to effectively bridge the gap between theory and practice and address new research challenges in reliability and quality management in practice. Postgraduates, researchers and practitioners in the areas of reliability engineering and management, amongst others, will find the book to offer a state-of-the-art survey of quality and reliability management and practices.




Managing the Unexpected


Book Description

Since the first edition of Managing the Unexpected was published in 2001, the unexpected has become a growing part of our everyday lives. The unexpected is often dramatic, as with hurricanes or terrorist attacks. But the unexpected can also come in more subtle forms, such as a small organizational lapse that leads to a major blunder, or an unexamined assumption that costs lives in a crisis. Why are some organizations better able than others to maintain function and structure in the face of unanticipated change? Authors Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe answer this question by pointing to high reliability organizations (HROs), such as emergency rooms in hospitals, flight operations of aircraft carriers, and firefighting units, as models to follow. These organizations have developed ways of acting and styles of learning that enable them to manage the unexpected better than other organizations. Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of the groundbreaking book Managing the Unexpected uses HROs as a template for any institution that wants to better organize for high reliability.




Dynamic Management and Leadership in Education


Book Description

This book presents a new integrated theory of dynamic management and leadership in one comprehensive approach. It offers a new way of looking at the field, drawing on a wide body of research and practice in the fields of leadership and management, across all sectors in education and more broadly. The book focuses on management against a backdrop of leadership theory. Including examples of practice and application in schools, colleges and universities, it uses a range of historical leadership approaches to scaffold different management techniques that are known to work in effective organisations. It explores the overlap between management and leadership as dynamic theoretical and practical activities, merging the two together into a holistic model that can be applied by managers working in educational settings. Its twenty-six chapters also consider the praxis of educational leadership and management from political, economic and ethical perspectives in relation to issues such as equity and widening participation, and outline how ‘managership’ impacts on student achievement. Offering a unique balance of theory and practice, across school, college and university sectors, the book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, graduate students and practitioners in the field of educational leadership and management, and will be important reading for all stakeholders in the area of educational effectiveness and improvement.