Here's an interesting article from last year about the practice of Six Sigma
at 3M. Summary: It didn't work well for them.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406.htm
Excerpt:
...four and a half years after arriving, McNerney abruptly left for a bigger
opportunity, the top job at Boeing (BA ). Now his successors face a
challenging question: whether the relentless emphasis on efficiency had made
3M a less creative company. That's a vitally important issue for a company
whose very identity is built on innovation. After all, 3M is the birthplace
of masking tape, Thinsulate, and the Post-it note. It is the invention
machine whose methods were consecrated in the influential 1994 best-seller
Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras. But those old hits have
become distant memories. It has been a long time since the debut of 3M's
last game-changing technology: the multilayered optical films that coat
liquid-crystal display screens. At the company that has always prided itself
on drawing at least one-third of sales from products released in the past
five years, today that fraction has slipped to only one-quarter.
Those results are not coincidental. Efficiency programs such as Six Sigma
are designed to identify problems in work processes-and then use rigorous
measurement to reduce variation and eliminate defects. When these types of
initiatives become ingrained in a company's culture, as they did at 3M,
creativity can easily get squelched. After all, a breakthrough innovation is
something that challenges existing procedures and norms. "Invention is by
its very nature a disorderly process," says current CEO George Buckley, who
has dialed back many of McNerney's initiatives. "You can't put a Six Sigma
process into that area and say, well, I'm getting behind on invention, so
I'm going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on
Friday. That's not how creativity works."
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