Six Sigma Stigma (PDF)
Here's an article from Fast Company magazine. The author visited Toyota in Japan and asked a somewhat uninformed question:
Eager to show we knew a thing or two about quality ourselves, we soft-balled our hosts with the obvious question: “When did Toyota start using Six Sigma, anyway?”
Long silence. After some awkward consultation in Japanese, the engineers asked us, “What is Six Sigma?”
Oops, a priceless moment there. TPS does not equal Six Sigma, of course. There are some conceptual similarities, but Toyota does not subscribe to Six Sigma. The article goes on to discuss how some companies that outwardly promote Six Sigma usage actually lag their non Six Sigma competitors in quality (including Xerox, Sprint PCS, and Ford).
Six Sigma, along with lean, has the potential to be nothing more than executive hot air and window dressing. The real challenge is in the details of actually making it happen.
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Mark's new book is The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation.
He is also the author of Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More, the Shingo Award-winning books Lean Hospitals and Healthcare Kaizen, and the anthology Practicing Lean.
Mark is also a Senior Advisor to the technology company KaiNexus.