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?