Performance Management & Strategy Execution Blog: The Glue

A Brief Primer on Lean Six Sigma and Its Benefits

Before I discuss Lean Six Sigma, I'll quickly cover the fundamentals of the two contributing approaches, Six Sigma and Lean.

Six Sigma is typically defined as a disciplined, statistical approach aimed at increasing profitability by reducing defects. There is a large Six Sigma "tool box" of analytical, data-driven approaches that help companies improve quality in this way.

I tend to think about Six Sigma more holistically than many of its current adherents. I also take to heart a comment made by Bill Smith, the Motorola engineer who invented Six Sigma: “If you want to improve something, involve the people who are doing the job.”

So I see the power of Six Sigma as greatest when it is thought of more broadly, as an organizational shift wherein employees use a disciplined approach to improve overall business performance, using data and focusing on controlling process variation. This is even more powerful when built into a Strategy Execution approach, so that improvement efforts are focused on the most strategically important problems for the business.

Do You Have an Innovation Scorecard?

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the International Society for Performance Improvement conference in Phoenix, Arizona and met one of the distinguished luminaries of the society, Donald Totsi of Vanguard Consulting.  Given the recent article in BusinessWeek (June 11, 2007) entitled, 3M’s Innovation Crisis: How Six Sigma Almost Smothered Its Idea Culture, I was captured by his findings about the core indicators of what it takes to implement innovative product and services.

Based on Don’s performance analysis of 10 companies that successfully launched RADICALLY new products and services to meet the demands of their marketplace, here are the top ten cultural practices, in order of their perceived importance of executing innovation: