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.