The Six Sigma Revolution

Some authors can irritate me with their approach to their presentation of their material. Here the author has used four footnote references at the end of Chapter 1, three referring to web sites and the fourth to a General Electric annual report. Thereafter, not one single reference is made to any available resources. Subtitled “How General Electric and Others Turned Process Into Pro ts,” the book actually separates itself successfully from other Six Sigma books by focusing exclusively on helping upper management effectively implement Six Sigma within their own companies. However, despite the book’s minimal technical details, because it is not targeted to black belts and green belts, other “nuts-and-bolts” books, such as those by Breyfogle (1999), reviewed by Gardner (2000), and Breyfogle (2001), reported by Ziegel (2001), were not deemed worthy of mention. Ziegel (in press) particularly recommended Pande, Neuman, and Cavanagh (2000) for its value toward efforts for Six Sigma implementation, but seemingly the only thing that this author values is his own ideas. All scathing criticisms aside, this is otherwise a very nice book. With its low price, the publisher has targeted it toward the mass business market. Unlike the ground-breaking Six Sigma book by Harry and Schroeder (2000), which was reported by Alexander (2001), this book does not attempt to blow managers away with pages of hype about the wonder and success of Six Sigma. After explaining how the quest for the ultimate quality improvement process progressed to what has become Six Sigma, the author provides eight steps to creating the business infrastructure that will allow for the successful implementation of Six Sixma. Chapter 3 sets forth the theory that customers, processes, and employees are the ingredients for pro ts. Chapters 4–9 provide the author’s own version of the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology (including two chapters on analysis). Design focuses on teams, customers, and process mapping, another version of those ingredients for pro t. Measurement focuses on two aspects, the plan for data collection and the calculation of the baseline sigma level. The former includes some brief discussion of sampling, and the latter deals with bell curves and process capability. Both analysis chapters deal with aspects of root cause analysis. The statistical tools for analysis do not progress much beyond simple plotting, but the latter chapter does contain much material on designing factorial and fractional factorial experiments. Improvement concentrates mostly on overcoming resistance to the new ideas that are determined by analysis to be the solutions. The chapter on control presents a lot of information on strategy and also several pages of discussion of control charts. The last chapter lists the author’s 10 concerns for the success of Six Sigma initiatives to avoid failure. Concern 1 says that “the key to Six Sigma is statistics, statistics, statistics” (p. 244). The author voices the complaint that “many Six Sigma consultants are statisticians” who “create the concern that you must turn your organization over to statisticians” (p. 245). Perhaps that is why BP limits its statistician population to one. In concern 10, “ignoring the management of change in your organization” (p. 262), the author promotes his next book, Making Six Sigma Last: Managing in a Changing Environment. Do I need mention that the author is head of a consulting group?