Treasure on Every Page
Ahoy, matey!
A new year is upon us… time to set sail on a voyage of discovery into a world of products and services designed to improve organizational performance and achieve business process excellence. Welcome to Quality Digest’s 2008 Quality Sourcebook, your handy guide to the companies in our industry that can help your organization get where it wants to go in 2008.
Over the following pages, you’ll find 14 directories in a wide spectrum of categories. We’ve broken these directories into seven sections, each one tabbed for your convenience. We hope that you’ll use these directories throughout the year to locate and partner with successful organizations that are specialists in the various methodologies of quality improvement.
This year, in a twist that goes along with our theme of exploration, we’ve scattered several pirate-themed icons throughout the issue. (See “Do the Map” on page 9 for details.) Your task, should you choose to accept it (and we know that you will), is to locate all of these icons. Write to us at comments@qualitydigest.com and let us know the page numbers on which you find each icon. Each icon may appear more than once. The first reader to send us all of the correctly identified icons will win a mind-blowing gift from our good friends at woot.com .
Speaking of good friends, no sourcebook would be complete without a hearty round of thanks to those who make the Quality Digest experience work. For starters, without you, our intrepid reader, little that we do would be possible. Nothing makes us happier than opening up the morning mail (e- or snail) and receiving a few pleasant words of appreciation from a reader who got some useful information from one of our articles. Sometimes there are not-so-pleasant letters, too, and although those don’t necessarily make us happy, they do make us better. So please keep the correspondence--of all kinds--coming.
If readers are the lifeblood of a magazine, then advertisers are the skeletal structure. The support of the companies that purchase ad space in our magazine helps us print and ship Quality Digest each and every month. These organizations are leaders in their various fields, and they offer the finest products and services in the quality industry. Certainly, as your needs arise during the course of 2008, consider contacting the companies that you find advertised in our pages.
Our writers, columnists, and other contributors are subject-matter experts who offer interesting and illuminating opinions on the central issues facing our industry. We’re always on the lookout for fresh voices to appear in the magazine as well, so if you have a unique perspective and an urge to write, consider submitting article ideas to us.
Last, and by no means least, I personally would like to thank the people listed at the upper right-hand side of this page. The Quality Digest staff is hardworking, inquisitive, and dedicated--and completely devoted to quality improvement, heart and soul. Without question, they are the finest group with which I’ve ever had the pleasure to work. In particular, many thanks to our patriarch, the kind and knowledgeable Don Dewar, who is the best boss anyone could ever hope for. Thank you, Don, and thank you, team.
With that, I ask you to tighten your Black Belt, put on an eye patch, get out your mapa do mundo , head over to Petco to buy a parrot, and join our crew of friends on a journey to a land of higher quality. May 2008 be your very best year yet.
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