Feb 15 2020
Whatever became of Six Sigma? | Alfred Kieser | brand eins
“TQM and Six Sigma are management fads that obey similar laws to clothing fashions. There are fashion designers who create the trend, and multipliers who disseminate and popularize it. These primarily include business consultants, but also scientists, managers, non-fiction authors or journalists. And there is the customer base that hopes to benefit from going with the fashion without having to think about it or take responsibility.”
Source brand eins
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Thanks to Ferdinand Grah for drawing my attention on LinkedIn to this interview of German management thinker Alfred Kieser. The article is in German. In it, Kieser paints a bleak picture of Six Sigma at GE and how former CEO Jack Welch leveraged it to his own benefit while wrecking the organization with rank-and-yank management. As for agility, he sees it as “just as content-free as the Balanced Scorecard.”
Some of the comments on LinkedIn dismiss Kieser as an old curmudgeon who thinks he has seen it all. In my experience, shorter than his, fads affect management just as Kieser describes. There have been fads in the past, there are today, and there will be in the future. We can deplore it but it’s pointless. With objectivity, we should instead figure out how to leverage fads to make progress.
It’s not quite as nefarious as Kieser describes. If we start from the principle that managers must not just to run operations but also improve them, we find that they cannot use the same methods forever, regardless of how effective they are. When first introduced in an organization, small-group activity, individual suggestions, Kaizen events, or Katas are perceived by the workforce as new and possibly exciting. Five years later, they are stale rituals and managers need something new to rekindle interest.
#managementfad, #sixsigma, #agility
February 16, 2020 @ 6:16 pm
Michel, are you supporting Dr. Kieser? His premise seems to be that hierarchical management will always revert companies back to command and control, and therefore everything that purports to move away from that is unrealistic. His main points seem to revolve around knowledge management (I listened to his 55 minute talk on YT from 2010) and he spends most of his time knocking attempted advances just because they have not yielded success (though I believe you and I both agree with him that Jack Welch is a complete hack).
Your suggestion that “stale rituals” of improvement oriented work will lead “managers to need something new to rekindle interest” strikes me as antithetical to what I thought was our common bond – the propagation of Lean Management into use as ‘the way’ to manage in the 21st century. Did I misunderstand something?
February 16, 2020 @ 9:30 pm
All I know of Kieser is this article, in which he discusses exclusively TQM, Six Sigma, and Agility. I have seen the first two fads come and go and the third one is in full swing now, at least in the software industry.
I don’t expect any reader to protest that TQM is alive and kicking but some may claim that Six Sigma is. As far as I am concerned, its showcases were Motorola and GE, and the rumps of these two companies have disavowed it. Kieser says nothing about Lean but I believe he would have if the interviewer had asked him.
While I see his description of the dynamics of fads as accurate, I sense that he views all attempts at improvement as hopeless and I certainly don’t follow him there.
To keep an activity from degenerating into stale rituals, you do need renewal not only to sustain engagement but also to meet new challenges. It’s just about staying current.
I don’t believe that TQM or Six Sigma were completely worthless. When fads have run their course, we should assess their legacies and incorporate what is worth retaining in the Industrial Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, or Production & Operations Management body of knowledge, to be taught to future generations.
Judging people and calling them hacks is not my cup of tea. All I know of Jack Welch is what I have read in the press. I have no direct knowledge of his style. What I have heard is that he made a Six Sigma Black Belt a requirement for promotion in GE management and that he introduced rank-and-yank as a human resource policy, neither of which makes sense to me.
Six Sigma Black Belts originally were supposed to be a small corps of internal consultants helping engineers with statistical design of experiments, not a certification every production supervisor should pursue.
GE’s rank-and-yank policy was adopted by other companies and experienced by people close to me. The idea that employee performance is distributed on a bell curve is demonstrably false, and systematically firing the “bottom 10%” a proven way to destroy teamwork.
What I am interested in is learning, possibly inventing, and passing on to others.