？Read the following article about management and quality control and questions that follow

？For each Question 15-20, mark one letter (A, B, C or D) on your Answer Sheet for the answer you choose.

Management is the process of getting things done through people. We know that part of this process is carried out with the development of an organization structure. However, there is more to management than just organizing the people and the work. Objectives must be set, plans formulated, people directed, and operations controlled. In making the necessary decisions, management must rely on all the skills at its command. As a result, management is both a science and an art.

However, quality control is one of the most important factors in management, in this article we are going to learn how the Japanese embraced the idea of quality control by Edwards Deming.

It is well known that the father of quality control is the American management authority-Edwards Deming. He despised many aspects of American management. In his view, competition, production quotas and end-of-line inspections, typical business practices in the USA in the mid-twentieth century, were evils rather than attributes. He believed, and almost religiously so, that quality should he a maxim. Insistence on quotas was no guarantee of quality; nor were end-of-line inspections. To Deming, quality meant prevention of faults by improving the product and the manufacturing thereof, not post-production cures. His ideas fell on deaf ears in his own culture, but were embraced by the Japanese and most certainly contributed decisively to the rebuilding of their war-damaged nation.

The Japanese cultural ethos made it possible for these ideas to work. Kaizen is a word familiar to all Japanese. It means doing things better, little by little; gradual, incremental growth and improvement. Rather than copy, the Japanese improve upon what they have at their disposal. The Kaizen concept is applied throughout Japanese life to products and to people, to systems and to services. It is a way of bringing about change by recognition of what is being done, accepting that it can be done better and finding ways to improve. An integral part of the Japanese way of doing things for centuries, Kaizen did not come to the attention of the West until 1985, when Masaaki Imai introduced the concept to the world. It has since been used widely as a means to obtain and secure competitive advantage within a sector or industry.

Hoshin Kanri, which is rather like a set of forms and rules that encourage staff to manage and control the direction or focus of a company, is another key concept. It refers to the way company policy is deployed, to the way results are improved by linking activities throughout the organization, to the way in which every single part of an organization contributes to the achievement of objectives. Through Hoshin Kanri, quality management and Kaizen are applied to the whole process of corporate planning.

The term Hoshin Kanri was coined in the mid-1960s when a report was published analyzing the Japanese application of Management by Objectives. By 1975 it had become widely accepted in Japan, but did not cross the Pacific for nearly a decade. The earliest books published in English about it date to the late 1980s.

Many companies and organizations have embraced these concepts at all levels. In NASA (the North American Space Agency) statistical quality control has been replaced with new tools to complete tasks, eliminate failure, exchange and disseminate information and make use of unfiltered, disordered verbal data. The systematic, multidimensional thinking underlying these tools can be and has been used in the development and improvement of systems (especially information systems) and related products.

An increasing number of case studies have been publi

A．was too dependent on quality

B．was insistent on preventing errors

C．had few strengths

D．was too obsessed with competition