Making Six Sigma Last - Hardcover

Eckes, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471415480 ISBN 13: 9780471415480

Publisher: Wiley, 2001

Synopsis

"Making Six Sigma Last is the most practical and helpful resource that I have seen on this subject. George's charisma and charm spill over into this interesting and entertaining book. Using one of George's many analogies, 'this is an upper-deck shot,' and combined with his first book should become the benchmark for Six Sigma learning."-Dan Porter, Chairman and CEO, Wells Fargo Financial
"An energetic, step-by-step exploration filled with interesting and entertaining examples of real-world business experiences. Making Six Sigma Last is a powerful action plan for managers!"-Guenter Bulk, Managing Director, GE Capital IT Solutions

About this title

About the Author

GEORGE ECKES is the founder and principal consultant for Eckes & Associates, Inc., a consulting group specializing in results-driven continuous improvement, Six Sigma training and implementation, organization development, and managing change. His clients include GE Capital, Pfizer, Westin, Honeywell, and Volvo. In 1996, EAI was chosen as a primary consulting organization for General Electric in their Six Sigma Quality initiative. Eckes has published numerous papers on the topic of performance improvement and is the author of The Six Sigma Revolution, published by Wiley. He can be reached at eckesg@aol.com

From the Inside Flap

In his successful previous book, The Six Sigma Revolution, the man who helped implement Six Sigma at General Electric and helped formulate their training program gave readers step-by-step instruction in the strategic and tactical aspects of creating a Six Sigma initiative in any organi-zation. Now, George Eckes revisits the most popular quality improvement methodology in history, addressing an even more critical component of the Six Sigma implementation process-one that can assure the stability and longevity of your own initiative.

Making Six Sigma Last offers you the tools your organization needs to make this quantitative approach to improving effectiveness and efficiency work for you. In this book, Eckes focuses on the cultural component of a Six Sigma initiative-which, if mastered by an organization, can drive quicker and more dramatic improvement in Sigma performance. It is also the component that most organizations ignore-and most Six Sigma consultants are unaware even exists.

Offering simple yet direct concepts and techniques, Eckes demonstrates the necessity of dealing with human nature in persuading any organization to culturally accept change. Whereas current Six Sigma titles focus on the technical elements of change, Eckes concentrates on balancing the cultural component with the technical-the only way to achieve successful Six Sigma. He explains how to systematically improve your chances of realizing a solid change initiative, including how to:
* Create the need for Six Sigma
* Diagnose the four types of resistance to Six Sigma and overcome them
* Shape a vision so that your employees understand the desired results and new behaviors
* Alter your systems and structures to support the new Six Sigma culture
* Avoid pitfalls in managing your Six Sigma cultural transformation
* Develop highly effective Six Sigma leadership

You'll discover how to create clear, motivating Six Sigma goals in your organization, as well as learn from case studies of both successful and unsuccessful initiatives. Eckes also imparts the proven training secrets of Eckes & Associates, Inc. and profiles triumphant Six Sigma leaders-from whom you'll receive valuable, one-of-a-kind lessons.

If increasing profits and stock prices, improving customer satisfaction, and saving large amounts of money sounds good to you, reach for Making Six Sigma Last-and master the key ingredients to launching and leading a Six Sigma effort.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Making Six Sigma Last

Managing the Balance Between Cultural and Technical ChangeBy George Eckes

Jossey-Bass

Copyright © 2001 George Eckes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-471-41548-0

Chapter One

Six Sigma Acceptance

The Ignored Element in Implementation

Within the last several years, Six Sigma has exploded onto the American scene as a prominent method of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of businesses. Companies like General Electric, AlliedSignal, and others have saved literally billions of dollars that have resulted in increased profitability and increased stock price. For example, since its adoption of Six Sigma in 1995, General Electric has saved more than 3 billion dollars. Jack Welch has said, "Six Sigma is the most important initiative we have ever undertaken."

Six Sigma is a management philosophy that attempts to improve customer satisfaction to near perfection. A Six Sigma company has little more than three bad customer experiences for every million opportunities. This level of near-perfect performance is a significant distance from where most organizations are today. It is estimated that most companies are at the two to three sigma performance level, which means that for every million customer contacts there are 308,000 to 66,800 defects.

Six Sigma moves an organization toward managing with facts and data. It is a management method that has customer satisfaction as its overriding philosophy. It achieves greater levels of customer satisfaction through focus and management of the processes of that organization.

To achieve greater customer satisfaction, there are three critical success factors: the strategic component, the tactical component, and the cultural component.

The strategy of Six Sigma is exclusively the domain of executive management. For Six Sigma to be more than just a cost savings initiative, management must create the infrastructure for improvement to occur. In my first Six Sigma book, The Six Sigma Revolution: How General Electric and Others Turned Process Into Profits (Wiley, 2000), I described in detail how management must create and manage the key processes of their organization so that Six Sigma activities move the strategic business objectives of the organization. I covered in detail how project teams apply the second major component of Six Sigma-the tactical component-so that processes begin to become more effective and efficient.

Making Six Sigma Last: Managing the Balance Between Cultural and Technical Change exclusively addresses the third and most important component of the critical success factors-the cultural component. It is the component most overlooked by organizations. It is the component that, if mastered by an organization, can drive quicker and more dramatic improvement in sigma performance. It is the component that most organizations ignore as they become preoccupied with the tactics of improvement. It is also the component that many Six Sigma consultants are unaware even exists.

* Q A = E

This simple but powerful formula explains why an organization needs as much focus on the third component of the Six Sigma initiative as they do on the first two. The Q, Quality, in this formula refers to the strategic and tactical elements of the Six Sigma initiative. The A stands for the cultural acceptance of the strategic and tactical elements of Six Sigma. The E refers to the extent that a company achieves Six Sigma as a technical measure of performance.

The formula is multiplicative. Think of assigning a number between 1 and 10 for how well an organization is doing the Q of Six Sigma. Pick up any book on Six Sigma and the focus will be on Q. Even mature organizations would rate their performance as an 8 or 9. Then assign a number for how well the company is culturally accepting the Q. In most cases, asking this question provokes puzzled looks. Often management has done little, if anything, to manage the acceptance of Q in their organization. If this number is a 1 or 2, multiplying the two higher numbers gives 18.

9 2 = 18

Is 18 a good number? If a perfect score is 100, what would you consider a passing score? I get the same answer that I do when I ask my two boys, Joe and Temo, what they would consider a passing score. To get an A in school, they would expect a 90 or better, a B would be scored as an 80 or better, a C would mean that the two numbers multiplied together would register a 70, and a mere passing grade would mean that the multiplied numbers would have to register at least a 60.

In this light, a score of 18 means the organization is not seeing the kinds of results typically associated with a Six Sigma initiative. Since in recent years management has invested significant costs and personal reputations on Six Sigma, there is usually a call to "re-double" the Six Sigma effort. What does this re-doubling of efforts look like? Obviously, the effort must be focused on cultural acceptance. In reality, if you don't know what elements increase cultural acceptance (and most companies don't), the re-doubling of efforts is spent on the Q. There is probably not much juice left in that fruit. So, after significant effort and investment, the organization moves from a 9 to a 9.5. Evaluating the redoubling of efforts using our Q A formula results in:

9.5 2 = 19

The organization may start to question whether Six Sigma is for them. The company may give up the effort and return to their old ineffective and inefficient management methods.

Making Six Sigma Last is devoted to the many concepts, toos, and techniques that drive the second number in the Q A = E formula. These concepts and tools are simple and direct. Compared to the statistical rigor and complexity of some of the Q tools, they may even seem elementary. However, a good consulting friend, Pam Dennis of Destra Consulting, said it best when she stated, "Implementing the hard tools of Sx Sigma is easy, implementing the easy tools is hard."

What Pam meant is that the appearance of Six Sigma Q tools like a designed experiment or capability analysis may appear hard but after some teaching, they are relatively easy to implement. Those tools are applied to a process. Getting an organization to culturally accept change sounds easy, but deals first and foremost with human nature. Dealing with the human psyche is a complex endeavor. Thus, while the tools I will teach you in this book may seem relatively easy, you will not be applying them to processes, but to people. As such, the level of complexity rises exponentially.

The good news is that many organizations have gone before you. This aspect of Six Sigma has been taught successfully in statistical training of organizations worldwide for more than 20 years. Before I was a Six Sigma consultant, I trained and practiced as a psychologist. I am still licensed as a psychologist so I bring both training and experience to the Q A = E equation.

Learning the tools in Making Six Sigma Last will be relatively easy. Becoming good at using them will take practice. There are six major areas to improve your A or acceptance number in the Q A = E equation. This book will show you how to:

1. Create the need for Six Sigma. 2. Shape a vision of Six Sigma so that employees understand the desired results and new behaviors of a Six Sigma organization. 3. Mobilize commitment to Six Sigma and overcome resistance. 4. Change your systems and structures to support the new Six Sigma culture. 5. Measure Six Sigma cultural acceptance. 6. Develop Six Sigma leadership.

When teaching Six Sigma cultural leadership, I start by dividing my class into two groups. In the first group, I ask each individual to think of some change they have either played a part in, or been subjected to, that was highly successful. It can be a personal change or some professional change. I tell them not to talk about the specifics of the change but to keep their change in mind and then answer the following question:

What were the factors that contributed to making the change you are thinking of successful?

I tell the second group to think of either a personal or professional change they were a part of that was an unmitigated failure. This group usually has an easier time coming up with their personal examples. I then tell them to answer the following question:

What were the factors that contributed to making the change you are thinking of unsuccessful?

Over the course of the next 20 minutes of the exercise, the two groups brainstorm the factors without revealing their specific change. The two groups develop a list that is usually 10 to 12 items long. Then I tell them to narrow their list down to the most vital items that contributed to either the success or failure of the change they were thinking about. In the many years since I have started doing this exercise, I have collected data on the results. First, since they had the more difficult assignment, I ask the team that was thinking of the successful change for the criteria that made their change successful. Below is listed the most frequently provided reasons why a change was successful and the approximate percentage of time it has been mentioned as a reason why the change was successful:

Strong leadership 78%

The need for the change was communicated 59%

Clear and motivating goals and objectives 56%

Resistance was managed 44%

The culture was modified to encourage change 38%

It's now time for the second team to report on the criteria that contributed to unsuccessful change. The data for the group for unsuccessful change looks as follows:

Lack of clear goals 87%

The need for the change was never understood 79%

No or poor leadership 46%

Those against the change were allowed to win 40%

No incentives to change 32%

When comparing the two lists, it is obvious that patterns exist. In the multitude of times I have done this exercise, it is truly amazing to see over and over again the same reasons why a change has been successful and the same opposite set of reasons why it failed.

It became obvious that these patterns of simple but effective criteria could be built into a model. When that model is applied to Six Sigma, it could dramatically increase the potential for an organization to embrace not only Six Sigma as a management method that would result in everyone in the company practicing never-ending improvement, but actually be able to achieve Six Sigma as a technical measure of performance.

From my days as a psychologist, I was painfully aware that change, even positive change, is resisted. After several years as an in-patient therapist, I spent time in out-patient work doing a combination of individual, family, and marriage therapy. Doing marriage therapy as a single person was quite an education. It probably contributed to me waiting to walk down the aisle until I was in my thirties.

In the case of marriage therapy, my patience was always tested. More times than not, one spouse would want to work on the marriage while the other was oblivious to the need to change the conditions of the marriage. In case after case, one party was being abused either verbally, emotionally, physically, or in some rare cases all three. What amazed me was that in these cases the victim did not see change-divorce-as freedom from abuse. Instead, they saw change-divorce-as loss.

For the longest time I struggled with how someone in such a miserable existence could not see the opportunities that awaited a life free from pain. I then remembered the work of D. Chris Anderson at my beloved alma mater, the University of Notre Dame. While a junior in South Bend, I took several classes from who was to be my favorite professor. Dr. Anderson taught a variety of courses and did research on experimental psychology. His research showed change to be an exceedingly difficult choice for rats and for people.

I remember a study he did where a rat traversed the path of a gridded runway and we would measure the rat's travel time down the grid.

During certain periods of hunger, the rat would expediently traverse the grid. Then Dr. Anderson electrified the grid and exposed the hungry rat to the sight of his food at the end of the runway. As the rat entered the gridded runway, a shock, not such a significant voltage to cause death but to cause projectile defecation, ensued. Of course, this was not a pleasant experience for the rat (nor for those of us who had to clean up after the rat).

What Dr. Anderson then showed was a learning experience that has stayed with me for years. Trial after trial, the gridded runway leading to the rat's food was opened. Time and again, the rat just stayed in his cage. Even when the rat began to experience more advanced signs of malnutrition, and he would have his cage opened so he could visualize the food he so desperately needed for survival, he remained almost physically paralyzed.

Years later doing marriage counseling I thought of Dr. Anderson's experiments and the relationship those experiments had to real life. I came across an exercise I use to this day that highlights the same concepts I learned as a junior at Notre Dame.

I ask everyone in my seminar to stand and find a partner. If there are an odd number of seminar participants in the room I ask the odd person out to act as my assistant in the exercise. The rest of the participants are asked to face their partner. I tell each pair of participants to study their partner carefully for 30 seconds.

I then instruct each pair of individuals to turn back to back. I then slowly give them the instructions for Round 1 of the change exercise. I tell them to change three things about their physical appearance. I further tell them there is but one rule: they cannot create a hostile work environment.

During the following minute, the participants almost universally start doing the same thing, removing clothing. First, a pair of shoes are removed. Then a tie is loosened, or a belt removed, and a woman's earrings are taken off.

Nervous laughter pervades the room. In the event of an odd number of people in the room, my assistant is wandering about, gathering comments to be used in the debriefing of the exercise. I then instruct the participants to turn back to back again. I tell them that Round 2 is ready to begin. I instruct everyone to change five additional things about their physical appearance without changing any of the first three things.

No sooner have I provided these instructions when I and my assistant start hearing comments like:

* "I don't have any more clothes to take off."

* "I can't change anything more about myself."

* "This is ridiculous."

As they utter these comments, they continue to make changes. Again, I state the one rule of not creating a hostile work environment. In the years I have done this exercise, despite the nervous laughter and resistant comments, everyone has followed the instructions. After a minute, the participants are told to turn around and find the five additional things their partner changed.

After a few minutes, I then ask them to turn around for Round 3. As you might expect, the protest is both uniform and vocal. When I ask if the participants want to go a third round, the response is a virtually uniform "No."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Making Six Sigma Lastby George Eckes Copyright © 2001 by George Eckes. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0471415480
• ISBN 13: 9780471415480
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256