Book excerpt: The current literature on quality management is very much focused on the implementation of the latest fads and fashions, or various tools and techniques such as Quality Function Deployment, Benchmarking, Self-assessment and Six-Sigma. Based on research carried out in collaboration between the University of Manchester (UK) and Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands), we believe that many organisations have lost sight of the basic elements of quality management. Therefore, we decided to focus with a ebook on these basic elements of the quality management philosophy, which are: Customer foc.