The Six Sigma Revolution:        How General Electric and Others Turned Process into Profits By George Eckes
Excerpts Reviews Bestseller Listings Buy It	John Wiley and Sons November 2000 274 Pages

Ranked Among the Top 25 Business Books of the New Millenium by Strategy+Business

"A book for non-technicians among the executive ranks who want to get an in-depth look at Six Sigma. This book is a major achievement that can be expected to have enduring value for years to come."

REVIEWS

Six Sigma Must-Read

Not all revolutions succeed and the same is true of efforts to design, launch, and then implement a Six Sigma program. There are several excellent books on the subject, including this one. Also Breyfogle's Implementing Six Sigma and its sequel, Managing Six Sigma, co-authored with Cupello and Meadows. For those who know nothing about Six Sigma, I suggest they first read what I describe as a "primer", Chowdhury's The Power of Six Sigma.

Of course, these and other books are essentially worthless unless and until dedcision-makers in an organization have both sufficient resources and a shared commitment to learn from the relevant experiences of others. I realize that there are at least some executives now involved with organizations whose senior-management is unwilling and/or unable to commit sufficient resources. Nonetheless, many may wish to understand what Six Sigma is (and isn't), and, how certain companies have used Six Sigma principles to thrive (e.g. Motorola, GE, and Allied-Signal). Eckes invites his reader to accompany him on "the pragmatic journey through a new management approach that is helping drive productivity and profits....[one whose focus is on] the involvement of management at all levels of an organization." He addresses the elements management must institute to create an infrastructure for Six Sigma to work. "The second major component of Six Sigma addresses the tactics that drive improved effectiveness and efficiency in an organization. This method uses a simple but detailed approach to improve the performance of existing processes."

Eckes presents the material within ten chapters whose titles correctly indicate their primary focus:

1. Introduction to Six Sigma
2. The Strategy of Six Sigma: Eight Steps to Strategic Improvement
3. Profits = Customer + Process + Employee
4. Project Start-up: Tactical Six Sigma
5. Measuring Project Sigma: How Close Are You to Perfection?
6. Data and Process Analysis: the Keys to the project
7. Root Cause Analysis: Never Stop Asking "Why"
8. Selecting Solutions That Drive Sigma Performance
9. Holding the Gains: Making Sure Your Solutions Stick
10. How Six Sigma Initiatives and How to Avoid Mistakes

In the final chapter, Eckes identifies a number of "concerns" (e.g. "The Key to Six Sigma Is Statistics, Statistics, Statistics") and then cross-references specific strategies and tactics which address those concerns. He also includes a boxed summary of "Key Learnings" which I found especially valuable within the context of the "critical mistakes" which so many companies have made and, presumably, others will make. I agree with Eckes and countless others that the most valuable lessons are learned from a rigorous analysis of failure. The career of Thomas Edison clearly indicates the differences between "efficient" and :"effective." His failure-to-success ratio was probably 100-1. Perfection is a destination, not a journey. A majority of the companies which have designed and then implemented a Six Sigma program eventually abandon that journey. When examining the ten "Concerns", Eckes helps his reader to understand why.

Ultimately, in my opinion, Six Sigma is an educational experience which requires rigor, passion, precision, dexterity, determination (indeed tenacity) and above all, patience. There is obviously a great deal to be learned from companies such as GE, Motorola, and Allied-Signal, of course, but one of the most important points Eckes makes in this book is that the knowledge of greatest value is what can be learned from and within one's own organization. The principles of Six Sigma are uniquely appropriate to that process of inquiry. If you are interested in Six Sigma, this is a "must read."

Robert Morris
Dallas, TX

Six Sigma without hyperbole & mysticism

Most of the Six Sigma books seem to fall into two camps. The first camp creates a mystical, magical program that promises results on the order of GE and Motorola if you only believe. The second camp repeats the promise in the intro and maybe the first chapter then serves up a repackaged statistics 101 course (and 201 if the book weighs more than 5 pounds). This book doesn't make promises - it explains, it illuminates, and even entertains in places

A Reader
Scottsdale, AZ
November 19, 2000

A Provocative Way of Analyzing Capital Investment Strategies

The Six Sigma Revolution presents the nuts and bolts of the management methods that turned General Electric from a pariah in the early 1960s, reeling from the conviction of many of its senior executives in a price fixing scandal, into the gleaming leader of world business at the beginning of the 21st century.

The man who led GE out of the wilderness, Jack Welch, an engineer and scholar, imposed a quantitative methodology on the company's manufacturing operations. Six Sigma, which denotes defect rates, has transformed the company into a leader in selected businesses, helped it to shed those in which it does not compete well, and raised profitability.

A management consultant who uses the six sigma methodology in his own work, George Eckes explores the math and the methods of transferring the system to other kinds of work.
The Six Sigma Revolution is not the first exploration of six sigma in a corporate history, but for investors able to handle a modest level of analysis of normal bell curves and standard deviations, it is a provocative way of analyzing what public companies, especially manufacturers, do with their capital.

Andrew Allentuck
Scottsdale, AZ
Friday, May 25, 2001

 

BESTSELLER LIST APPEARANCES

• Of the 40 books on Six Sigma, it has consistently been in the top 5 Best-sellers list.
• #2 Best-selling book of all types at 3M.
• #12 Best-selling book of all types at Honeywell.
• 5 Star rating on Amazon.com
• Rated the 2nd best Business book for the year 2000 by Fatbrain.com
• Top 10 best-selling non-fiction book in Singapore (January 2001)
• Featured book of the month (April 2001), Comprehensive Performance Partnership
• 5th best-seller (out of 348) of business histories tracked by Fatbrain.com.
• Featured book on Harvard Business Review (February 2001)
• 13th best-selling book - Puerto Rico (January 2001)