Richard Mallory introduces a leadership framework for system management, including practical tools and guidance for its use. It enables an agile quality framework throughout an entire organization that will build the kind of "learning organization" championed by Peter M. Senge in his classic book, The Fifth Discipline. This innovative framework opens a broad new horizon for management science through the use of structured leadership systems as a new foundation for organizational s...

This book presents a simple framework and guidelines for implementing visible and uniform auditable standards of quality in government that can fundamentally and permanently reshape its efficiency, effectiveness, and value. It opens the possibility of a day in the not-too-distant future when a quality audit can provide a uniform and valid report card on every government agency that is a companion to an annual audit of the financial books. Its easy-to-use quality standards are objective, me...

After discovering her daughter's abusive relationship, Jenna packs her daughter off into the world. Mallory needs to start over. She finds a job as an aspiring model for a well-established magazine. While in training, she runs into the magazine's silent owner, Richard, a man also looking for a new start. Can Mallory handle the demand of both her new job and this enigmatic gentleman?Richard's been looking for a change. After a long business trip, all he wanted was to relax at his ca...

Welcome to Black Cat Weekly #23. Lots of good stuff this time—highlighted by a novel from Golden Age mystery author Rufus King, Duenna for a Murder. Plus a few novellas, and lots of great short stories, a solve-it-yourself mystery from Hal Charles, and great selections from Michael Bracken (Laird Long’s “Taken for a Ride”—which qualifies as both a mysery and a fantasy story) and Barb Goffman (Michael Allan Mallory’s “Random Harvest”).On the science fictio...

A seminal work for the public sector, Quality Standards for Highly Effective Government (Second Edition) redefines what is expected and what is required for excellence in management. The practices presented here also benefit non-profit organizations, and indeed any organization in which services are not directly rewarded by a purchase transaction.The book introduces three new performance standards that frame the value add of management, for processes, systems, and aligned ...

Charles de Mertens' *An Account of the Plague which Raged at Moscow, in 1771* provides a meticulous chronicling of the devastating epidemic that swept through the Russian capital. In a narrative that blends eyewitness accounts with rigorous observation, de Mertens employs a straightforward, yet poignant literary style, allowing readers to grasp the harrowing realities faced by the city's inhabitants. The work emerges from the backdrop of Enlightenment thought, marked by an emphasis on empi...

On an October evening in 1949, lawyer turned private detective Lawrence Mallory thinks he's taking his wife, Kate, out for an evening of wine, lobster, and other frivolities. What he doesn't realize is that he's about to embark on the most perplexing and complicated case of his career not to mention the most dangerous.While at dinner, he and Kate run into Noreen Logan, a somewhat ditzy one-time flapper and an old flame of Mallory's. Upon learning Mallory is now a private eye, she decides s...