Review by Brian Backe of the book Quality Management in the Nonprofit World [San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1991, 194 p.].

Total Quality Management (TQM) is one of the hottest topics in the management literature of the business sector today. Kennedy's book is one of the first devoted to applying the principles of TQM to the management of nonprofit organizations. The author leans heavily on the ideas of Philip Crosby, one of the leaders of the quality field, who has written several far-reaching books on the subject of quality in corporate America. The conceptual framework of this book is borrowed directly, with attribution, from Crosby's Four Absolutes - the key principles that both authors argue must be followed to establish a quality-driven organization:

• Defining quality in terms of meeting specific customer (client, funder, and community) requirement instead of equating quality with goodness.
• Designing a system to achieve quality (meet customer requirement).
• Defining a performance standard for quality (doing things right the first time and setting zero defects as your ultimate standard).
• Developing a measurement system to evaluate quality.

This book takes a first step into a subject matter that badly needs to be understood and applied in the nonprofit sector. Kennedy is clearly on familiar ground as he points out the many ways nonprofit managers focus on everything but quality in their earnest, yet sometimes misguided, attempts to help clients and secure funding.

The author offers a stream of thoughtful observations on dozens of issues facing the typical nonprofit leader, from the fundraising and philanthropy (the war of paperwork between the grantmaker and grantseeker) to human resource management; from financial management to dealing with feeling of rejection as a manager. Whether it is fundraising, marketing or leadership development, this book covers it all. And that is where it strays off course.

Under the banner of quality the author wanders around the field of management, touching on so many subjects that we lose touch with the key principles he is trying so hard to reinforce. The discussions are not deep enough, and the examples tend to be very general or come from somewhere other than the nonprofit work setting (flying planes and playing baseball, for example). The author's mini-lectures on good fundraising and financial management are interesting, but, of course, these subjects are covered in much more depth in the growing body of books and periodicals that deal exclusively with each of these subjects. The section on setting standards begs for many more real-life examples of nonprofit organizations that have set measurable performance standards on client requirement on their way of reaching the ultimate standard of zero defects.