A real job for managers in the health service.

Suggests that current conditions in and around the NHS are creating stressed and difficult work for NHS managers--this obscures the fact that, in common with all managers in the West, they have been given the wrong work to do. Proposes that Western management is built on command and control assumptions which are entirely dysfunctional for today's work. Outlines a challenge to the principle of command and control and describes, with the help of W. Edwards Deming's views, what an alternative picture of work could achieve.