What do these senior executives all have in common?

• Jim McNerny (CEO, 3M)
• Bob Nordelli (CEO, Home Depot)
• Dan Burnham (CEO, Raytheon)
• Paul Norris (CEO, W.R. Grace)
• Fred Poses (CEO, American Standard)
• David Weidman (CEO, Celanese)
• Jim Sierk (CEO, Iomega)
• Wes Lucas (CEO, Sun Chemical)
• Ed Breen (CEO, Tyco)

Following their experience as top leaders at General Electric, Motorola or AlliedSignal (Honeywell), they each moved on to new assignments at the helm of the organizations listed above. Most notable is that, almost immediately, every one of these leaders insisted on deploying the performance optimization, waste reduction and innovation initiative known as Six Sigma.

Having just come from environments fully engaged with Six Sigma, they had seen something, firsthand, that made it clear — this wasn’t just your typical “fad of the month”, and it certainly wasn’t “just for quality or just for manufacturing”. With Six Sigma, they experienced real business innovation and improvement a change initiative with the enormous power to impact customers, market share and the bottom line.

Dr. Ronald Snee, one of the world’s foremost experts in process and organizational improvement, put it this way, “With improvement methodologies evolving over the last 100 years, Six Sigma is arguably the best improvement strategy and methodology available today.” If you have seen organizations engage in “lean” manufacturing or “lean” enterprise efforts, you’ve witnessed a subset of the Six Sigma methodology at work.

Six Sigma is simply science applied to business. Any business. Change agents, often known as Black Belts and Green Belts, are trained as scientific detectives physicians to detect, diagnose, and cure the most strategic, value-generating product or service delivery systems within and across enterprises. Operations of every conceivable kind, from sales and marketing to manufacturing and government services, have seen enormous impact to both their internal and external customers, profitability and growth.

When I led the GE Six Sigma course for Jack Welch, himself, I made note of Welch’s pointed reminder to his direct reports in the room Six Sigma is as much about developing future leaders to be effective change agents as it is about creating improvements. In his most recent book, WINNING, he emphasized this objective, once again, “Perhaps the biggest but most unheralded benefit of Six Sigma is its capacity to develop a cadre of great leaders.”

In organizations fully engaged, Six Sigma is where the action is — the laboratory where leadership traits are developed, practiced, tested, and proven. Driving change when you don’t have direct authority is one of the hardest things to do in a business environment. It’s one of the ultimate tests of a leader and one of the greatest personal growth experiences an individual can have. Those who are the most successful at driving change will be highly sought after within their business and beyond. This is why 3M’s Chairman and CEO, W. James McNerney Jr., indicated his executives use Six Sigma as a primary mechanism for spotting their successors, “Six Sigma is about developing tomorrow’s managers — it gives them a shot to show what they can do.”

Have we armed our employees and ourselves with the latest state-of-the-art scientific investigation tools and techniques for eliminating waste while driving speed and efficiency? From our smallest to largest technical, administrative and service operations, it’s time for us to take advantage of the lessons other organizations have learned — and discover what we’ve been missing!

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1. Steven Bonacorsi Says:
   September 27th, 2007 at 1:58 pm

   Scott,

   Thank you for sharing yet another great story. I wanted to add that while I was training a wave of Black Belts in Crotonville many years back, we were fortunate enough to have Jack sneak into the back of the classroom to listen in as he often did with no warning. I remember I was teaching some statistical tool when I turned around and saw Jack quietly taking his seat with no one else noticing.

   Of course, I lost my train of thought and Introduced Jack to the astonished class. One of the brave new Black belts asked Jack if Six Sigma was here to stay at GE, if the leadership were truly behind him and the initiative. He responded after taking a slight pause to think, saying “yes, quality is what we are about, its part of everything we do and while my leadership team does not have to use Six Sigma to change, they can’t do it here”.

   Later I read in Jack’s Strategic Handbook “Control your own destiny or somebody else will” variant uses of this phrase. A hallmark of Jack’s approach – change using Six Sigma, and of course other great initiatives such as CAP and Workout, or move on to another team.

   I believe it was his energy and committed leadership that hallmarked him as the greatest change leader of the century.

   Warm Regards,

   Steven Bonacorsi
   Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt