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™.