Aimee E. Cowher

On a few different occasions, I’ve recently been reminded about my early experiences in Six Sigma.  Two of them, in particular, have caused considerable reflection. Most notably for me is hearing the term “back to breakthrough” and I only wish I could take credit for the term.  That goes to Mike Cyger of iSixSigma who is putting together a conference by that name that has a good chance of 1) creating similar reflection for some old-timers in the Six Sigma community, 2) causing relative newcomers (the masses who have taken the plunge into Six Sigma trying to duplicate the results of GE outside of a strong performance driven culture nurtured) to rethink their approach, regroup and reinvigorate and even a chance of 3) compressing some of the skepticism among naysayers who have avoided Six Sigma (or at least the label because the tools are embedded in most continuous improvement methods!)  Allow me to expand on each.

I still recall the announcement of Six Sigma at AlliedSignal back in 1994 as a means to achieve Operational Excellence^®, a necessary but not necessarily sufficient step in the pursuit of the vision to be “a premier company, distinctive and successful in everything we do.”  Hats off to Larry Bossidy and AlliedSignal leadership marching to the beat of his drum for capitalizing on every opportunity to communicate the vision, link it to strategy and explain that Six Sigma was the tactical plan.  At the time, I wasn’t familiar with the concept of Strategy Deployment but now recognize it as such.  One of the things that made it work, and gets me “back to breakthrough” is that improvement objectives were BHAGs (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals)  results were expected and leadership was absolutely engaged. 

All Six Sigma projects were expected to deliver a 50% improvement in the primary metric with no degradation in the secondary (cheater) metric.  In the beginning, there was also an aggressive financial target that had to be acknowledged by the controller as hitting the bottom line.  The reported financial savings tended to be conservative as I personally recall not being able to declare cost avoidance as savings.  For example, if you increased capacity but there wasn’t new product filling the void, i.e. building more w/ the same resources, then it didn’t count.  Some would argue the wisdom of this approach but it kept the savings clean and more importantly, built rigor and discipline into project selection that seems to missing in some efforts today. 

Saludos,  Aimée