Quality management is a broad subject whose principles and practices are best understood when studied in the context of real-life organizations. This article describes a major quality assessment field project that serves as the integrative vehicle for an MBA curriculum. Each year the entire entering MBA class devotes a portion of 8 months to performing comprehensive quality audits of external organizations. Whereas they reinforce the principles of quality management, the field projects also require students to integrate the knowledge gained from each of their MBA courses in critically examining all operational areas of their host organizations.

Productivity and productivity improvement are popular topics. People generally agree about the need to improve productivity in this country, yet there is little consensus as to how to achieve productivity improvement or how to measure this improvement. Furthermore, there is misunderstanding regarding the relationships among productivity, profitability, and price recovery. This paper defines and examines these relationships. These concepts are used to evaluate the productivity of a hospital's pathology laboratory. The distinction is made between income statement analysis and the potential role of productivity measurement. The analysis demonstrates that although profitability is declining, productivity improvement is making a positive contribution to profitability. On the other hand, the decline in price recovery more than eliminates the positive contribution of productivity improvement to profitability. This approach is perhaps one of the first serious attempts to measure the productivity of knowledge workers in a service organization.

This paper describes a simulation model to estimate the enrollments and expenditures associated with various policy alternatives for the post-secondary education system of a state, with Indiana as an example. Enrollments, operating expenditures, and construction costs are predicted for every public and private school for each year until 1985. The basic model-building technique employed is regression analysis on historical data, but it is supplemented by other quantitative techniques and by experts' predictions. The model may be used to predict "most Likely" future enrollments and costs, to perform sensitivity analyses to better understand the impact of various exogenous variables upon the system, and to evaluate possible policy alternatives. Including all of the schools in a state makes possible the evaluation of policy alternatives such as possible configurations of new two-year public schools, the effect of tuition changes, and the effect of enrollment ceilings for larger state universities.