Hiatus

With apologies to my loyal readers, I must put the Better-Faster-Cheaper blog on indefinite hiatus. Once I have a couple of professional issues in hand, we will resume our discussions. Thanks to everyone for your feedback. See you again soon.

Hope

The final track on Nas's album, Hip Hop Is Dead, is called "Hope," and it allows for the faintest expectation that hip hop might actually rise again. The same is possible for Six Sigma. If we take good care of it, shed some of the baggage that has weighed us down, and focus on what's RIGHT about the method, there's a glimmer of hope that Six Sigma might still add value.

But how? Well, the Sudden Six Sigma approach - a simple, cost-effective and results-oriented methodology - retains Six Sigma's powerful focus on root cause analysis, data-driven decision making, strategic alignment and sustainable, continuous improvement, while emphasizing immediate impacts, the power of intuition and the often overlooked human aspects of effective transformation.

Adaptability and versatility is the key to preserving the vitality and potency of Six Sigma. While the training and experience of certified Six Sigma Master Black Belts, Black Belts and Green Belts holds the promise of tremendous value, we can't continue to apply the same hefty, burdensome and jargon-addled methodology to every business problem in every enterprise and every industry. We must not underestimate the power of common sense, intuition and, above all, a healthy sense of urgency.

If we're going to transform business and move forward competitively, we won't do it with overly academic and out-of-touch armies of paralyzed analysts. And we can't proceed under a banner of linear regression and chi squares. We must adopt a Sudden Six Sigma mindset. In the end, our mantra must only be:

Better. Faster. Cheaper.

Next time, we'll get into the details of the 6 Ds of the Sudden Six Sigma Better-Faster-Cheaper process.

Who Killed Six Sigma? - part two

Picking up where we left off, let's take a closer look at Six Sigma's cause of death and its killers. First, though, let's be clear. Malicious and murderous intent are not to blame for this death. In fact, organizations like GE who have been implicated in the discipline's demise had only the purest and most idealistic of intentions. We'll have to call it manslaughter. But how did it happen?

Well, as we discussed in an earlier post, multinationals like GE began applying the rigorous, data-intensive Six Sigma methodology to every available business problem. In some cases, this yielded some impressive wins. In many, many other cases, however, the toolkit proved too hefty, the methodology too complex, and the pace of change too glacial to make a real difference.

Before long, the Black Belts practicing Six Sigma within these organizations were seen as woefully out of touch with the reality of business. Six Sigma itself was soon viewed as a gargantuan, lumbering beast whose head was filled with eggheaded, unrealistic theories, esoteric acronyms and terminology, and a surplus of bureaucratic hoops to jump through.

Once Six Sigma began to look like an obstacle to rather than an agent of change, its vitality quickly slipped away. Business leaders distanced themselves from it, hiding their Green Belt certifications in a cabinet and looking toward the horizon for the next generation of agents of growth and change.

Those who were charged with carrying out Six Sigma's bidding, even as it lay on its death bed, took the usual paths of grief. Some soldiered numbly on in denial. Others angrily railed against the method's impending expiration and became deeply entrenched Six Sigma acolytes.

But let's not forget that the corporate world's best and brightest had been chosen to study, implement and guard Six Sigma, and with them lies the hope for the birth of something new, something that preserves the methodology's strengths, learns from the lessons of the past, and leads the way to fast-paced and meaningful change.

The mission is simple: to do business better, faster and cheaper. In the next post, we'll start to dig into what the future holds and how we might breathe new life into the world of process improvement.

Testimonial: a word from our sponsors

First of all, my sincere apologies to the regular readers of this blog for the prolonged inactivity. Client priorities have caused me to put the blog on the back burner, but fresh content is waiting in the wings. This week, however, I wanted to take a moment to share a testimonial from a recent client of mine. I think it sheds light not only on my unique capabilities, but also on the ancillary benefits of truly engaged process improvement work.

"Having spent twelve years with a GE business, I’m very acquainted with the benefit bringing process improvement expertise to help can be. We asked Eryc to help us with our most critical process that was not performing at the right level necessary to deliver the kind of customer service we commit to our customers. Since this process touches nearly everyone in the business and our customers, it was imperative that we were not only thorough and sensitive to all the stake holders concerns, but also bold enough to build a level of resiliency to the process to ensure it would remain robust through continued improvement.

Eryc brought a collaborative approach to the effort that immediately put our internal stake holders at ease. He quickly won over those individuals who were originally reluctant to contribute, whether out of concerns over perceived loss of control or suspicion of an outsider. Not only did he successfully bring together the stake holders and address their concerns, he was able to pull them all up and together built a forward-looking process that addressed our immediate needs but is also built for sustained improvement.

I feel confident that the work Eryc did with the team will not only result in us delivering a superior level of service to our customers, but has also introduced our team into the possibilities of a focused process improvement strategy. That, in the end, may be the most valuable output we get from the engagement."


Michael E. McLaughlin
President
Buffalo Communications

Who Killed Six Sigma? - part one

As promised, we'll continue to use Nas's Hip Hop Is Dead as our inspiration for exploring what happened to Six Sigma and what it means for the future of effective business process improvement. Last week, we faced the fact that Six Sigma is dead. This week, let's look a little deeper into who killed Six Sigma and how.

We don't need to delve into a full biography of Six Sigma - plenty of those are available in great books and online. Check out Michael George (not George Michael), Mikel Harry, Peter Pande and many other brilliant Six Sigma scholars for the complete story of its rise from poor, ugly stepsister to belle of the ball. This blog has come to bury Six Sigma, not to praise it, but a few key facts about its life might help us understand its death.

Six Sigma was born in the manufacturing world. As legend has it, Motorola was on the verge of being crushed by its competitors as rampant manufacturing defects eroded the company's reputation and upset its customers. Borrowing concepts from Statistical Process Control, Total Quality Management, Lean manufacturing and other established schools of thought, Dr. Harry and his colleagues at Motorola developed and implemented the Six Sigma methodology in an attempt to unearth and fix the root causes of the complex engineering problems that plagued the company. Though the approach was met with skepticism, especially among the old guard, it worked, and Six Sigma is widely credited with turning Motorola around and saving it from financial ruin.

Well, once other companies got wind of Motorola's success and Six Sigma began to gain a reputation for helping companies solve their toughest problems, there was no stopping it. Innovative thinkers and business people began to apply Six Sigma to all manner of situations, and were mostly successful. But it was the multinational conglomerates that really took the methodology to the next level, proved it could be used in almost any context and, in so doing, killed Six Sigma.

GE, a company whose product portofolio includes light bulbs, nuclear components, television programs and multi-billion-dollar financing, to name a few, began playing with Six Sigma in the early 90s. To this day, the company spends millions on Six Sigma-related efforts and resources. Improving on the original methodology, institutionalizing it across its 300,000+ employees and generating thousands of success stories, GE has become the sine qua non of Six Sigma shops. Most of this humble blogger's knowledge and expertise in this field, such as it is, is thanks to that company's tireless commitment to the discipline.

But it's also companies like GE that killed Six Sigma. After proving the approach in manufacturing environments, GE began applying it to all manner of intangible products, services and processes - everything from improving deal closure rates in commercial finance deals to improving ratings on TV shows. Again, there are many success stories there. But this is also the beginning of the end. Six Sigma's breathing and pulse became irregular, the color ran from its face, and its palms got clammy.

Next week, we'll conclude the gruesome story of Six Sigma's ignominious demise. Don't you just love a cliffhanger?

Six Sigma Is Dead!

Last year, NY rapper Nas released an album called Hip Hop Is Dead. It's a concept album that laments the fact that a beautiful, innovative artform has been killed by crash commercialism (and subsequent greed and lowering of artistic standards), petty in-fighting (and subsequent murders of some of the medium's greatest talents) and an ignorance of history. Much of the album is presented as a murder mystery of sorts, challenging the listener to examine the current state of the discipline and to figure out how to resurrect it.

Before you start thinking you took the wrong off-ramp on the information superhighway, let me explain how this relates to process improvement. You see, in a way, Six Sigma - arguably the most revered process improvement methodology in the world - is dead, too. It has been transformed from our greatest hope to our greatest joke - a punching bag, a punchline and a Punch-and-Judy show to be ridiculed, reviled and - above all - resisted.

To be fair, Six Sigma's death can be attributed, in part, to the simple phenomenon called backlash. Management trends are as prone to this as British pop stars, with yesterday's darlings turning into today's demons (or doofuses) in the blink of an eye and for no discernible reason. But there's more to it than that. Six Sigma has both its well-intentioned adherents and its equally well-intentioned detractors to blame for its untimely demise. In some ways, it even has itself to blame, so you might even consider it an assisted suicide.

In the next post, we'll examine the sordid details of Six Sigma's death, who killed it, and how. After that, we'll explore what hope the future holds (significantly, "Hope" is the last track on Nas's album), what we have learned from Six Sigma, and where we should go next.

In the meantime, instead of rushing out to buy Hip Hop Is Dead, check out Nas's brilliant 1994 debut, Illmatic, instead. Not only is it an undeniable classic, it should also be brought forward as Exhibit A in the Hip Hop murder trial.

Welcome to the Jungle of Process Improvement

Thanks for being here.

This blog aims to demystify the discipline of process and performance improvement and make it accessible to everyone. In a world of increased competition and shrinking margins, customers demand higher quality, quicker turnaround and lower cost. In short, we all want - and NEED - to do things better, faster and cheaper.

Statistical process control, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, Lean and flow manufacturing and other methodologies have loaded our toolboxes with tactics and techniques to help us admire and ameliorate our business problems, but there is an esoteric air about them that makes them inaccessible to many businesses, individuals and organizations.

When I speak with individuals in the business world - whether working within a large corporation or running a sole proprietorship - I hear a loud cry for help. That cry never says, "Show me how to do a Design of Experiments!" or "I need more linear regression!" No, the cry is always, "Help me do things better, faster and cheaper!"

With that screaming need in mind, this blog aims to offer thoughts and approaches that bring process and performance improvement into the realm of the possible and the practical. As our business problems grow and fester, we need visions, mindsets, behaviors, tools and techniques that we can start using today. Collectively, I call that Sudden Six Sigma™, an approach that yields immediate impacts and lasting results.

But you can call it: Better-Faster-Cheaper™.