Thirty years on from the seminal works on human resource management (HRM) by Beer et al., we examine how the subject has developed. We offer a normative review, based on that model and critique the assumption that the business of HRM is solely to improve returns to owners and shareholders. We identify the importance of a wider view of stakeholders to practitioners and how academic studies on the periphery of HRM are beginning to adopt such a view. We argue that the HRM studies so far have given us much valuable learning but that the subject has now reached a point where we need to take a wider, more contextual, more multilayered approach founded on the long‐term needs of all relevant stakeholders. The original Beer et al. model remains a valuable guide to the next 30 years of HRM. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Top-down total quality management (TQM) programs often fail to create deep and sustained change in organizations. They become a fad soon replaced by another fad. Failure to institutionalize TQM can be attributed to a gap between top management's rhetoric about their intentions for TQM and the reality of implementation in various subunits of the organization. The gap varies from subunit to subunit due to the quality of management in each. By quality of management is meant the capacity of senior team to (1) develop commitment to the new TQM direction and behave and make decisions that are consistent with it, (2) develop the cross-functional mechanisms, leadership skills, and team culture needed for TQM implementation, and (3) create a climate of open dialogues about progress in the TQM transformation that will enable learning and further change. The TQM transformations will persist only if top management requires and ultimately institutionalizes an honest organizational-wide conversation that surfaces valid data about the quality of management in each subunit of the firm and leads to changes in management quality or replacement of managers.

Acting as consultants, the authors developed a process by which leadership teams in Alpha Technologies' many business units could develop an organization capable of implementing strategy and learning. Leadership teams of 20 units implemented the self-diagnosis and redesign process between 1988 and 1994. The process was designed to develop the ongoing capacity of the client organization to achieve systemic change, to surface undiscussible data about barriers, as well as to develop a partnership with employees. Research was conducted to determine whether the intervention achieved its intended objectives, as well as to understand the elements of the intervention design, and managerial and organizational context that lead to these results. The research, funded by the Harvard Business School, relied on the following methods: content analysis of task force reports, interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation. The process succeeded in the short term in all of its attended objectives. The process, however, does not appear to have increased the client's underlying capability for organizational learning. The implications of the findings for intervention theory and practice are discussed.

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