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Rating: 
Summary: The 6 Sigma Book for Leaders Planning a Deployment
Review: Of the many books I've read on 6 sigma, this IS the book on how to plan and deploy a 6 Simga initiative in a company. This is not a book on the tools and how to use them in detail. It is discussed, but more in terms of highlighting the training required and the caliber of people assigned. There is a comparison and contrast of successful deployments and less successful deployments. The authors disect why they failed. They have a GE bias, in that at least on of the authors is heavily versed in the GE system. This is not to the detriment of the book, but it does color the successful path they advocate. That path is well trod and proven successful. There are variations to that that can be successful, and will depend heavily on the culture of the company. The path they advocate attacks the common organization barriers that ANY initiative will face. So in that sense, the book is broader that just 6 simga. Those elements are:
* Active and strong leadership from the top * Appropriate resources, people and funding
* Demand results
* Be willing to change internal policies and procedure to support implementation This is a must read for anyone planning an implementation, or looking to fix one.
Rating:
Summary: The 6 Sigma Book for Leaders Planning a Deployment
Review: Of the many books I've read on 6 sigma, this IS the book on how to plan and deploy a 6 Simga initiative in a company. This is not a book on the tools and how to use them in detail. It is discussed, but more in terms of highlighting the training required and the caliber of people assigned. There is a comparison and contrast of successful deployments and less successful deployments. The authors disect why they failed. They have a GE bias, in that at least on of the authors is heavily versed in the GE system. This is not to the detriment of the book, but it does color the successful path they advocate. That path is well trod and proven successful. There are variations to that that can be successful, and will depend heavily on the culture of the company. The path they advocate attacks the common organization barriers that ANY initiative will face. So in that sense, the book is broader that just 6 simga. Those elements are:
* Active and strong leadership from the top * Appropriate resources, people and funding
* Demand results
* Be willing to change internal policies and procedure to support implementation This is a must read for anyone planning an implementation, or looking to fix one.
Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Review: This book differs from most other Six Sigma guides in that it identifies, by name, companies that failed at Six Sigma. So many authors have presented Six Sigma as something magical that it is refreshing to see its warts. Make no mistake - the authors are not out to debunk or dethrone Six Sigma, a management philosophy and method that has been their professional life for many years. They clearly believe that Six Sigma is worth the investment of time, brain power, leadership and political capital that it requires. But they aren't afraid to point out the fact that it does require serious investment, and that management must sustain its commitment for years to unlock the full benefit of the Six Sigma approach. The book is a tolerably good read, albeit dry. It mercifully spares the reader any puffery or promotion, and it lays out the axioms of Six Sigma life in a very lucid format. Occasionally, it stoops to cliché, but not terribly often. We recommend it to those who need to know what it really takes to achieve Six Sigma performance, and how to begin.
Rating: 
Summary: Six Sigma for Those Who Read Books for CEOs
Review: This is a book about getting your organization to adopt Six Sigma. This book focuses on excellent techniques that are needed for convincing upper management of the value of Six Sigma. The target audience seems to be CEOs and their top assistants. In fact the authors pretty much concede that implementing Six Sigma is impossible without CEO intervention. Little can be found to help line managers implement a culture appropriate for Six Sigma. This fine book would have been even better had they addressed line issues more aggressively and had more on how to communicate Six Sigma in a manner that would not leave the "rank and file" thinking Six Sigma is just "old water in new bottles". I dare say in many companies, the rank and file will assume that Six Sigma is ineffective jargon. Further, this will to a large extent be due to oversimplified misunderstandings of Six Sigma. Most Six Sigma training emphasizes that Six Sigma is used when the solution is unknown. Yet I only hear people mention Six Sigma when they have a solution (sometimes a solution in search of a problem). "We need to finish this project to improve our Six Sigmas" and "we should [insert project goal] so we can all get our green belts" are typical of the comments I hear that are laughable to someone who understands Six Sigma. This book's weakest sections are the first few chapters. The authors compare companies who had successfully adopted Six Sigma and those who did not. The authors believe that the successful adopters shared (and the unsuccessful companies did not have) the following characteristics:
- committed leadership
- use of top talent
- supporting infrastructure The authors eventually come out and say that the CEO should dedicate a percentage of his/her time to Six Sigma: money is not sufficient! Having worked at GE, this conclusion seems inevitable: Jack Welch did, in fact, put a lot of personal attention into adopting Six Sigma. However, we don't all work for someone like Jack Welch. In his autobiography, Welch describes not giving bonuses to those who were not working on Six Sigma. This was his way of ensuring that all the top talent were working on Six Sigma projects because otherwise managers would be unable to reward their top talent. GE had another thing going for it that set the stage of Six Sigma: a culture of managing by facts and numbers and not opinion. Remember, when other companies were "focusing on core strengths" in the mid 1980s, GE was expanding in finance, particularly leasing. Why? It supported their other businesses and created tax shelters that saved tremendous amounts of cash. As long as these subsidiaries could demonstrate ever-increasing profits, they could get ever-increasing resources. Subsidiaries that could not come up with the numbers were sold or shut down, debates about "core" or not core did not enter into the picture. In this environment, if Six Sigma could demonstrate results, the corporate culture would adopt it. Certainly, Welch's actions made Six Sigma happen more quickly, but he had won the battle long before when he fostered a results-oriented culture. Being able to briefly and clearly describe what you are trying to do has become a critical tactic in modern leadership. In business we call this a "mission statement", in politics, its called, somewhat derisively, a sound bite. The next edition would benefit from the reworking of one of the early chapters to one that would help management create a Six Sigma mission statement. I've read some other books NOT on Six Sigma that by analogy bring home the weakness of Six Sigma literature. To learn how to create a mission statement, I recommend Carville and Begala (2002). They used a passage in the Bible, John 3:16, as an excellent example: "For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten son so that whoever believes in Him shall not die but have everlasting life." They assert that this passage summarizes in 25 words the essentials of Christian theology. To paraphrase Carville and Begala, if the Bible can explain all the important tenets of Christianity in 25 words, surely 25 a word sample mission statement for Six Sigma can be provided for those who want to convince an organization to adopt it. I would also recommend Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" as a companion book. Lewis (author of "Liar's Poker") uses Wall Street trading as an analogy to explain why the Oakland Athletics baseball team is one of the successful franchises with much less money than most. But I also see an analogy relevant to the topic of Six Sigma. "Moneyball" shows how one can achieve superior results by testing what everyone thinks they know with fact gathering and rigorous analyses. Moneyball will inspire anyone trying to implement Six Sigma to value testing assumptions with measurement. A quick read of the reviews on Amazon will give you a feel for why people are skeptical of 6 Sigma: the feel-good tone of most writing on 6 Sigma and the insistence that it "is not a flavor-of-the-month management trend" make many of us suspect that 6 Sigma is not much more than hollow jargon and acronyms. The readers are left with the essential difficulties of positive change in any organization: you need to overcome assumptions that your organization's subculture may not even realize it has. What a corporation does by accepting Six Sigma is that it empowers people to gather data to challenge what "everybody knows". Most importantly, it sets a standard of very high quality, which reinforces the sanctioning of data-driven change. I feel that this book comes up short in this regard, as do the other books I've read on Six Sigma, but otherwise is a good description on how an upper-level manager can bring about organizational change in general and implement Six Sigma in particular.
Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Book
Review: Without a doubt this is one of the best books ever written on Six Sigma and I should know as I have read nearly every book written on Six Sigma over the last three years. However, let me clarify something up front. This book does not delve into the tools of Six Sigma nor the actual statistical methods of Six Sigma like Air Academy Associates excellent books 'Basic Statistics' or 'Understanding Industrial Designed Experiments'. What this book does, however, is address the following topics which so far every other book on Six Sigma has failed to cover and clarify: 1. The right projects, the right people: Identifying your company's most promising Six Sigma opportunities and leaders.
2. How to hit the ground running: Providing leadership, talent, and infrastructure for a successful launch.
3. From launch to long-term success: Implementing systems, processes, and budgets for ongoing Six Sigma projects.
4. Getting the bottom-line results that matter most: Measuring and maximizing the financial value of your Six Sigma initiative What makes this book such a good value is that the author's of the book clearly know what they're talking about and their wisdom from implementing actual Six Sigma projects is priceless. This book is really a blueprint for implementing and sustaining Six Sigma and provides excellent advice on how to avoid the pitfalls that so many companies have run into during their failed attempts at implementing Six Sigma. The book is written in clear, easy-to-understand language with just the right amount of graphs and charts so even people who know nothing about Six Sigma will benefit from reading it. My advice is to buy this book and Michael George's outstanding book 'Lean Six Sigma' together so that you truly get an appreciation for what Six Sigma is and what it can do when combined with Lean.
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