Published books

Since 1991, Nicolas Rousseaux has published three works on management, corporate culture, and quality.

 

Médiation, Le sens du management

Le sens du management with Village Mondial publishers

Nicolas Rousseaux

The meaning of management
Europe between America and Asia

  • Nine simple recipes for a personal and professional journey
  • A historical, sociological and philosophical interpretation of European management memory
  • Real-life experiences collected from London to Milan, from Madrid to Helsinki

The Meaning of Management has been produced in collaboration with Boissard Consultants and the Collège des Ingénieurs [College of Engineers].

Management is dead, long live management! Today, managers have reached a turning point: management models imported from the United States and Japan have not really worked. European institutions no longer have a monopoly on truth and businesses have lost their way.

This crisis has transformed Europe into a cold-blooded monster that gives rise to more anxiety than accomplishment.

And yet Europe’s very roots, culture and diversity provide a rich vein of solutions from which managers can mine their new raison d’être.

The author traces the paths to follow and accompanies us throughout a journey of discovery that we make for ourselves.

On that journey, we discover good responses, gain a more robust confidence, organize more efficiently, make better decisions and realize our differences.

All of which leads to a style of management that is far better balanced between the demands of corporate life and managers’ new expectations.

Village Mondial ISBN 2 84211 0048

Médiation, le culte de l'Entreprise

Le Culte de l'Entreprise with Autrement publishers

[Le culte de l’entreprise]

Company worship

Changes, values, cultures

Nicolas Rousseaux

Just how extreme can the media coverage of companies and the hero-worship of their leaders become? What major technical and human changes do companies face? Yesterday a privileged battleground for the class struggle, today the company has become a laboratory for a new political and social consensus, an object of desire, of fantasy. And the company boss has assumed star status.

The company is also evolving from within. Taylorism is on the way out, the workforce has become fragmented, the factory is losing its local ties, the crucibles of production are undergoing a metamorphosis. We refer constantly to corporate “culture” and corporate business plan. The company is “responding”. It is still searching for its way between common sense and complexity. We want it to be an example, a model for society, but it is continually buffeted by issues of ethics and democracy.

Henri Weber, Claude Marti, Jacqueline Grapin, Jean Favier, Henri Vacquin, Alain Lebaube, Hervé Sérieyx, Jacques Chérèque, Jean-François Saglio, Claude Bébéar, Tom Peters, Jean Auroux, Thierry Gaudin,… historians, journalists, philosophers, management experts, and researchers all here contribute their views on the image, the role, the technical and human evolution of the enterprise in today’s society, both in France and in the wider world.

This book, completed in 1988, was directed by Nicolas Rousseaux in collaboration with Philippe Merlant.

Mediation, Traité de la Qualité Totale

Traité de la Qualité Totale with Dunod publishers

[Traité de la Qualité Totale]

Treatise on Total Quality

Under the direction of Vincent Labouchaix

New management rules for the 1990s

Preface by A.V. Feigenbaum

Chapter 3

Nicolas Rousseaux

The delayed change of the 1980s

This text repositions the appearance of total quality into its historical, economic, and social at the end of the XXth century. At the beginning of the century, Europe was the center of the world. However, two world wars brought about its ruin/disappearance.

From the 1970s, the economic crisis took over from the Thirty Glorious (1945–1975). Later, in the 1980s, finally began to understand that the world’s balance had changed, with the emergence of another center of gravity around the Pacific zone (Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, China...).

This slow realization brought to the Old Continent the greatest change it had ever experienced, to regain some of the influence it had lost. It was at precisely this time that Europeans discovered the management techniques so dear to Japanese companies: total quality.

In November 1948, General Tojo and ex-Prime Minister Hirota, locked in their cells, realize that they will not be able to escape death. Hanging will be the only end for these two representatives of the Japanese autocracy that caused the Empire of the Sun to sink into total war. Two million dead, 40% of towns totally ruined... The victors, with the pale faces of the Plains of Texas, of the Rocky Mountains, of the Californian beaches, have landed in a devastated country.

Forty years later, somewhat bundled up in a long woollen overcoat, the honorable Shigeru Mizuno, accompanied by his wife, crosses the reception hall of a grand hotel on the Parisian right bank. This old man, with a hesitant gait, resident in Yokohama, with a degree from the Yokyo Institute of Technology (class of 1934), has just delivered his lecture to a very select handful of French managers. His topic: TQC (Total Quality Control).

In less than four decades, Japanese power has risen from the ruins. And the entire world, wide-mouthed, is taking part in this advent.

Shigeru Mizuno recounts in his own way the resurrection of his country and its people: “In 1949, I remember, we spent our time studying the industrial standards of the US military equipment that passed through our hands. It was the methodological angle that interested us. And then, a year later, we saw Deming we who came to give his first lecture on quality, swiftly followed by Juran.”

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