Jul
9
Six Sigma’s Dirty Little Secret
Filed Under Leadership
Six Sigma has been very, very good to me.
I’ve had the pleasure of doing work that interests me for the past 30 years because three guys – Bill Mitchell, Bob Galvin, and Marty Rayl - gave me freedom to gain practical knowledge about something where I had only academic knowledge.
I’ve met more brilliant and driven people than I could have ever expected in a normal corporate career (but usually not both in a single person – pretty interesting design by whatever you believe to be a higher power).
I’ve had a chance to teach and forever change many people’s way of thinking. It is a very interesting and gratifying process to watch. Not everyone has thanked me for it or been pleased with the outcome although I always have been.
I’ve learned that someone without an elite education can teach and enlighten someone who has an elite education. The reverse is obviously true as well.
I’ve had people with no recognized college degree teach me more about my profession and life than anyone else I’ve met (thank you Jim Blanden and Jim Berryhill).
In other words, I had a heck of a good time, learned, and had several levels of pretense and bias striped away in the process.
I’ve also made a little money along the way, but to quote my hero Billy Bob Thornton – “I don’t have a nickel of it left”.
Life is good.
The Six Sigma “industry” is a fraud.
It is filled with people who have never changed a thing.
Major portions of those that have changed things act petty and therefore tear down other good people in the wake of their pursuits.
It is focused on training, when execution is the only thing that matters. Training has become the focus because it is easier. You also don’t have to take responsibility for the results, you just point to your customer and blame the lack of result on them.
The offering under the label of Six Sigma has expanded as the content has become mediocre. Just look at those calling themselves universities – what a joke.
Self proclaimed gurus are writing books that proclaim the obvious as enlightenment. Lean and Six Sigma is the most obvious, but the “innovation” writings are a joke as well. Revelations such as people are more innovative when given time to think about the topic in advance is the one I’ve been laughing about since January. You want innovation? Hire innovative people and give them their heads, Bob Galvin knew that thirty years ago. So did Jack Welch and Larry Bossidy. You want to know more about how to do that? Learn Predictive Index.
The good news is that the ”industry” is dying. People who are honest about who they are, like Bill Hathaway, are taking over the training space and those with “university” attached to their name are on life support. The institutions that sold obvious things such as innovation are laying off in huge numbers. The only bad news here is there are a lot of really good people who trusted these charlatans who are looking for a job. Kind of like General Motors or war – collateral damage is always painful but a fact of life.
Six Sigma is dead, long live Six Sigma.
The growth in productivity consulting is in companies that just go in and take money off the table. There is phenomenal growth, driven by companies based in Europe and some old head cutters from the US. The problem is they are focused on organization and behavior; they are leaving process efficiency and effectiveness on the table. Any process improvements being obtained are happenstance, usually driven by great Six Sigma folks that are seeking shelter from the fallout mentioned above and just can’t help themselves despite their employer’s “model”. They are also not leaving any knowledge with their clients on how to do these things themselves.
What should be the new model? Simple –
1) A thorough evaluation of systems based on known best practices and an organization’s strategic direction. The evaluation is company wide, not just Ops and Supply Chain. This usually takes 2 to 4 weeks using 3 to 5 competent business people. This is done business unit by business unit, facility by facility.
2) A rapid deployment by seasoned change agents to take money off of the table and to demonstrate the possibilities to the client. Takes three to six months. It should have a payback period of 4 -6 months and should self fund the entire endeavor with a tidy profit for the customer. This is done business unit by business unit, facility by facility. This effort should include organization restructuring and address behavior.
3) Training in efficiency and effectiveness for the customer’s resources. Label it anything you want but it is the training of people to be expert in the flow of value, the reduction of variation, and the hitting of market windows with products and processes that are correct and able to run at rate on day one. This takes about 4 months per cycle and the ratio of mentor to student should be in the 1:4 region. Class sizes should be big enough to guarantee the cross organizational relationship that don’t happen in small classes and the number of instructors should be minimized.
What is different about this? It’s not focused on training; it’s focused on results. It’s not focused on haphazardly chosen projects; it’s focused on systems. And best of all, it can only be done by people who know how to implement and share back their knowledge.
Go learn Predictive Index, there is only a small portion of the population who can do this and only a portion of those want to live this lifestyle.
Long live the pursuit of efficiency and effectiveness. The need was there 100 years ago and it will be there 100 years from now. It has never been needed more than right now, industries are emerging, merging, and acquiring; big organizations have had knee jerk reactions to this bad economy and broken okay processes and ran knowledge out the door. And yes, organization and behavior need to be addressed as well.
Who cares about labels? Let’s go fix systems.
Gary
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