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Making Six Sigma Last
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Making Six Sigma Last

Managing the Balance Between Cultural and Technical Change

George Eckes
Wiley, 2001
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

No one knows Six Sigma, which seeks near perfect customer satisfaction, like George Eckes, the consultant who literally wrote the book on it (The Six Sigma Revolution: How General Electric and Others Turned Process into Profits). In his second book, Eckes emphasizes the importance of molding organizational culture to generate broad acceptance of a Six Sigma initiative, using illustrative examples from his workshops. He describes ways to overcome internal resistance to change, to sell the program’s benefits and to get key people as well as the masses on board. If you are launching a Six Sigma program, Eckes provides many specific suggestions of strategies you can employ. But because much of Eckes’ wisdom can be applied more generally to organizational change efforts, getAbstract recommends this insightful book to any executive, whether or not Six Sigma is your strategy of choice.

Summary

Selling Six Sigma

In recent years, Six Sigma programs have become accepted as a way to make businesses effective and efficient. Several companies, including General Electric and AlliedSignal, saved billions of dollars with this approach, which led to increased profits.

Six Sigma strives for near perfection in customer satisfaction. A company with a successful Six Sigma system in place has about three bad customer experiences for every one million customer contacts. Usually, companies are at the two to three sigma level, reflected in some 67,000 to 300,000 defects for every million customer contacts.

To get this high level of satisfaction, improve your delivery process and customer interaction. Top management needs to support the program and must establish the necessary infrastructure to make these improvements possible. Essentially, this program has to be based on three key components: strategic, tactical and cultural. "Strategy" is defined by your objectives and "tactics" are how you plan to reach them.

Unfortunately, most organizations focus so strongly on the tactics of improvement that they overlook the most critical component of launching a Six Sigma...

About the Author

George Eckes is the founder and principal consultant of Eckes & Associates, Inc., a consulting group specializing in Six Sigma training and implementation, results-driven continuous improvement, organizational development and managing change. His clients include GE Capital, Pfizer, Honeywell and Volvo. He has published numerous papers on the topic of performance improvement and wrote The Six Sigma Revolution about establishing Six Sigma programs.

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