While the 1990s have seen sustained attempts in Australia, on the part of the federal government and others, to encourage firms to adopt International Best Practice, the results so far are somewhat disappointing. Firms find themselves tugged in several different directions, by competitive pressures, by industrial relations shifts, and by the demands for higher levels of quality, timeliness and responsiveness. While they are exhorted to adopt teamwork and other initiatives that go under the rubric ‘Best Practice’, there is as yet little sense of the underlying principles that inform these organisational innovations, nor of the history of their introduction into Australian organisations over previous decades.

In May 1995, under the auspices of the Australian Best Practice Demonstration Program, and the Australian Quality Council, an international colloquium was convened, by myself and Professor Malcolm Rimmer, to help shed light on these issues.