[VaBthang4]

I work for GE Financial Assurance and all of GE lives Six Sigma. It is one of the main reasons GE is such a strong company.

Even 99% accuracy falls short

Six Sigma is a set of statistical and management tools that can make leaps in improvement. When something reaches Six Sigma, it has a failure rate of 3.4 per million, or 99.99966% accuracy. However, being just 99.0% accurate can sometimes spell disaster. It means:

At least 200,000 wrong drug prescriptions each year. Two short or long landings at major airports each day. 5,000 incorrect surgical procedures every week. 20,000 lost articles of mail per hour. No electricity for almost seven hours each month. 50 dropped newborn babies each day.

[Media Insurgent]

Is it just me or does this whole idea of using mathematics-based business management models to win a war sound an awful lot like Robert McNamara redux?

[PatrioticAmerican]

Six Sigma = How to measure failure without ever understanding the competence required for success.

No "process" can ever teach the knowledge necessary for professional competence, and no expert ever needs such a process.

Six Sigma, PMI, TQM, ISO, CMM, et al., are best at ensuring how to flip a burger or cook fries. I sure as hell would not want my surgeon going through a "process" on how to perform a procedure. That is the difference between training and education.

Training is a step-by-step, monkey-see monkey-do procedural instruction. Education is understanding how things should be and knowing how to make it that way.

There may be SOPs and SPPs in an educated and competent environment, but that is a far cry from the procedural "do it this way, and if it is any different, then we'll analyze the hell out of it and try to determine how it should be."

Every expert knows what is needed to be understood to ensure quality and repeatability. Most of these “processes” interfere with advanced knowledge and expertise. Hell, ISO keeps my company from being able to make a hire in under one week, and usually it takes two weeks. Before ISO, we did a far better job and could hire in an afternoon. Yes, I have heard, “Then you are doing ISO wrong”, except that several ISO “experts” have all recently concluded that it really does take that long for what we need to do.

All these “processes” do is absorb money from needed areas and give some academic morons something to do other than produce product.

[tracer]

Thanks for the link to yet another crappy Orbitz pop-up from which there is no escape....8~)

[Vinomori]

Six Sigma is a good thing. It will be another advantage over the animals who don't get what it is, including some who are posting here. Intelligence (both kinds) matters. Knowledge is power.

[fogarty]

What a bunch of bullsh*t this all is. GE is NOT a strong company because of it. It is a strong company because of strong leadership. In short, the PEOPLE made GE, not the process. Microsoft is a lot more financially secure than GE, and you'll find little anything Six Sigma about it. Strength is in PEOPLE, not in processes.

[MattinNJ]

Guys who sit around and think things like this up make me realize that, in the game of life, I'm not playing Jeopardy, I'm really playing Wheel of Fortune.

[swarthyguy]

For intelligence work; where judgement, intuition and support from your superiors means everything? How does a good FBI/Intel guy benefit from this stuff. Streamline a process for designing chips or to evaluate the risks in financing a project, but for intel?

Would Louis Freeh have been a better director if he had this program?

[tm22721]

GE's strength is its brandname, not Six Sigma. I speak from 20+ years experience in middle management.

Outside of manufacturing yields, Six Sigma is mostly useless unless you want to turn into a full time statistician and crank numbers all day.

Six Sigma projects at GE tend to be makework projects for those in Engineering, Sales and Marketing.

BUMP