Demise of Six Sigma

Business has had enough of Six Sigma. Let’s get back to work.

On December 14th, 2021, on the website Quartz (qz.com) two of their writers were discussing Six Sigma. They considered how this appeared in the 1990’s promoted by Jack Welch (and ridiculed by 30 Rock). They discussed how Six Sigma suddenly became the “thing” that management had to have. Essentially they reviewed how it had become a trend, the “flavor of the month”. It had been jammed down the throat of unsuspecting management who were familiar with the application of buzzwords without substance, and understood that they needed to spend money to train people on the buzzwords to remain relevant.

They discussed how Six Sigma was applied to sales people, human resources, and management in general. The application of Six Sigma as a cure-all. Then they discussed how it lost its relevance.

Because it lost its champions – Motorola and GE and particularly Jack Welch – Six Sigma was fast fading from the common lexicon. It is no longer the keyword search maven it once was.

Business has had enough of Six Sigma. Let’s get back to work.

Engineers (you know who you are) know differently. They know that many of the elements of six Sigma cannot leave manufacturing or engineering. Just because some management buzzword kings decided Six Sigma was the Golden Child (until something else shiny came along) did not mean the tools, the techniques, were valueless. Engineers (and the associated accounting cousins) understood that if company A had a defect rate of less than 5%, and company B had a defect rate of less than 0.5%, company B was 10 TIMES BETTER.

I discuss the packaging of Six Sigma with every engineer I coach in continuous improvement. What we call “Lean”, or TPS, is a cultural creation that works well with the Japanese culture – but not American culture. Right, wrong or otherwise, American culture likes packaged, instructed, rule-bound methods. We like to see big change. We like to “shake things up”. We innovate much more than we increment. Increment even sounds kind of nasty. Which do you want to do – change the world or sit over in your cubicle and increment? Not sexy. Not American. We revolutionize and reinvent. Go big or go home.

The headache with the American model, other than being really fickle, is that it is expensive. It is often earth-shattering. Elon Musk landed a rocket on a barge – and the barge was really a giant drone. Seriously. You don’t get that by incrementing in a cube. You get that by kicking over all the other ideas and saying “I want THIS.” “Make THIS happen.”

The stuff that happens in between ass-kicking changes and earth-shattering revolution is, unfortunately, the search for the next cool thing. In the case of Six Sigma a couple of folks at Motorola repackaged what they observed from the long, slow-moving tide of change the United States shared with Japan. Had Japan been an all-or-nothing culture, the information and techniques brought by Deming and Shewhart would have fallen on deaf ears and Japan would be a different industrial contender today. They listened, and they found a way to blend this information and these techniques into their long-established culture. When that very same information came back to the United States via the swift rise of Toyota and Honda, American Manufacturing looked at it to see what “trick” we could adopt.

Six Sigma was the best repackaging of what we had shared with Japan, and Japan had returned to us. But how their culture used the information did not jive with our culture. It wasn’t “revolutionary”. So Motorola packaged it, and when Jack Welch got wind of it he – Jack Welch – turned it into the revolution. With the mighty wind of GE breaking onto the sails of Six Sigma it was spread quickly as the next hot tip, the “flavor of the month”, the thing that must – MUST – be on your resume somewhere. It got applied to everything that wasn’t nailed down.

And thus Six Sigma became a target for obsolescence.

The methods and techniques are awesome and powerful and apply to manufacturing. In some areas you can find ways to apply the techniques and statistics to information flow and office management, but primarily everything in Six Sigma, Lean, TPS – is about manufacturing.

Today, Six Sigma is important, if not critical, to competitive manufacturing and engineering. Not being schooled in these techniques and not using them as a starting point is to not be a contender. Lean, or TPS, is in the same arena. There are areas in both camps that are important, and being a “believer” in either one might not be the best approach. If Six Sigma is falling out of favor in the business crowd as a management technique, fine. I think the skill set for developing teams – a core element of Six Sigma – is valuable for any business manager, but I can accept moving to the next flavor. When it comes to manufacturing and engineering, though, assuming Six Sigma is “fading” would be a terrible mistake.