Six Sigma for Breakthrough Leadership

The renowned business management system can be used to drive defects out of a product line, overhaul a complex business process, or utterly revolutionize an enterprise. Why not use it to transform -- yourself? Dr. Mikel J. Harry, co-creator of Six Sigma and founder and president of the Six Sigma Management Institute, argues you can do exactly that. He talked with Business Finance about the latest incarnation of Six Sigma thinking.

Business Finance: Six Sigma has always had ties to leadership issues, with its focus on executive sponsorship, the roles of champions and black belts and so on. What developments led up to your realization that it could be applied broadly to leadership thinking per se?

Mikel J. Harry: After all these years and all the large corporations that I've deployed it in, you start to see common threads from company to company, regardless of product or the type of organization they are. I was a pack rat at saving correspondence, old case studies, projects, and reflections. I had a mountain of information and data, and several years ago I started synthesizing and boiling it down.

It became apparent that we lost the dream. Six Sigma has now become commoditized. It's pretty much culturally institutionalized in major companies and universities around the world. And that's good for the purposes of propagation of knowledge, but it's bad in the sense that they've removed the creative thinking. It's kind of a paint-by-numbers system now. Back at Motorola when we first created Six Sigma, we didn't have a clue how we were going to get there. It was a dream, a vision, and we had a set of fundamental beliefs that we had to hold tight to.

The biggest thing Six Sigma did for us then was that it forced us to re-examine the way in which we got the work done. Not by tweaking the existing system; we had to reinvent the system if we were going to create a 2000-times improvement in five years. You can't do that by just turning a few knobs here and there in an existing set of processes. You have to redesign and reinvent.

It started off as a breakthrough focus. So we came out of the era of the '70s and early '80s of continuous improvement, and Six Sigma was introduced as a breakthrough tool. And then it became commoditized and drifted back toward continuous improvement.

BF: How does that original visionary focus crystallize into a leadership approach?

MJH: Black belt or green belt training is pretty rigorous; even though it's commoditized, it's still very intensive, very analytical, logical, methodical. And when a person repeats that cycle over and over in project after project, he or she naturally starts to absorb the Six Sigma way of thinking. They become naturally leadership-oriented because they now know how to fix things, and other people gravitate around them because they don't know. So Six Sigma became a mechanism to develop a workforce of world-class leaders.

It was clear that it wasn't for everybody, though. You have to have some pretty good background and be pretty sharp to be a green belt or black belt. But as I started synthesizing and extracting ways of thinking from that 20 years of data, things started jumping out at me, and I uncovered the underlying pattern of thinking behind Six Sigma and its success. It is qualitative, not quantitative, in nature. It's a way of reasoning in a very scientific deductive way to achieve a dream -- without all the data and statistics and everything else.

And it dawned on me that this was easily teachable to virtually anyone. Somebody with an average IQ and a high school diploma could grasp this and leverage their leadership capabilities, not only in a work team, but in their personal life as well.

BF: What are the system's main components?

MJH: In a nutshell, Phase 1 is the definition of values; Phase 2 is the identification of what we call the catalyst dream; Phase 3 is the reverse planning of the milestones that will get us there; and Phase 4 is identification of the vital few driving and restraining forces.

First we have to identify our values -- what we believe has worth to us, whether it's material or spiritual, physical or mental -- and we have to prioritize those things and peel off the top three, four, or five.

Then we look for the catalyst dream. For example, at Motorola 25 years ago, the company was in dire straits. We were losing business like crazy. We realized we needed to focus on a single thing that would impact other things. And we realized that single thing was quality, because every time we eliminate a defect we eliminate cost, we eliminate floor space, we eliminate head count. So we could impact many of the values of the company by improving this one thing. If we could achieve that catalyst dream it would trigger automatic realization of other values like greater customer satisfaction, higher reliability, lower cycle time, and greater capacity.

Next we have to break the realization of the catalyst dream down into fundamental milestones -- typical project management stuff.

Then, in order to get from one milestone to the next, we need to identify the forces that drive us and the forces that restrain us. We need an action plan, so we focus on the vital few driving forces: the 20 percent of the forces that will explain 80 percent of our movement to the next milestone.

BF: So how does that work in practice?

MJH: It's a pretty simple little system of reasoning that focuses people and rallies them around to common action.

Consider a typical work team in a corporation, where the rubber meets the road. The people on such teams tend to be younger people. They may be led by an individual who's not very experienced, perhaps a few years out of school. And the organization hands them a stretch goal like 'Let's create a 50 percent reduction in cycle time in the next 12 months.' They're like a deer in the headlights; they have no clue what to do. So they have meetings to discuss it, people have competing ideas, different kinds and ways of reasoning are introduced, and it drags out. And often, unfortunately, the dream is never realized.

It dawned on me that the Six Sigma way of reasoning is a perfect tool for work teams; young people can walk in, pick it up, and lead their teams in a methodical way that guides them to breakthrough.

No one would think they could get to the Olympics without a coach, yet we see corporations setting incredible goals that they expect people to win without coaching. The attitude is "Okay, they have an MBA from Harvard, surely they can do this; they should already know how!" But if they're honest with themselves, CFOs know that back when they were leading little work teams they were fundamentally clueless.

I remember very well many years ago I'd sit down with my team and ask "What's your plan?" and I'd listen to them go around and argue and go to the flipchart and draw diagrams. But nobody was saying "This is what we have to do in principle: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3," and methodically stepping through it in a filtering kind of way, identifying the vital forces, and leveraging them to drive forward momentum.