All good news to drive efficiencies into a manufacturing process

A fascinating article has just been published in Business Week on the tension Rosetta Stone between the relentless drive for efficiency at 3M and the price paid in innovation. 3M fell from number 1 in 2004, to number 7 this year on Boston Consulting's Most Innovative Companies list. The article references back to Fry, the famous inventor of the Post-it who places the blame for this loss on the application of Six Sigma to 3M's research labs. One telling quote illustrates the point: Steven Boyd, a PhD who had worked as a researcher at 3M for 32 years before his job was eliminated in 2004, was one of them. After a couple of months on a research project, he would have to fill in a "red book" with scores of pages worth of charts and tables, analyzing everything from the potential commercial application, to the size of the market, to possible manufacturing concerns. DMAIC, the Sig Sigma equivalent of the Ten Commandments, says it all. Define, measure, analyze, improve, control, but really bad news for innovation or general aspects of service involving customer interaction. DMAIC assumes that a system can be broken down into its component parts, each part optimised and then reassembled to create a more efficient whole. You can see from the article how 3M used this to drive operating margins up, all good news. The trouble is that reductionist methods (of which Six Stigma is the exemplar) assume order, repeatable and stable relationships between cause and effect. For complex systems it is contra indicated. I was in the Twin Cities a few weeks ago and someone in 3M said, with great wisdom I thought: We have put Six Sigma back in its Rosetta Stone Software box. One of the interesting things about Six Sigma is not the BPR on speed aspect of its obsessions, but the addition of a quasi religious cult with the whole Black-Belt phenomena. The creation of an elite group of disciples, exempt from the relentless regime of measurement that they impose on unsuspecting natives, smacks of the worst aspects of evangelical invasion of aboriginal communities (including interestingly the elimination of existing language). Having no real context, these modern day Inquisitors cannot see the richness of the evolutionary present, and seek to eliminate it to produce the uniformity of their simplistic future heavenly reunion with the Gods of order, efficiency and clinical tidiness.The growing cult of leadership, the use of the tools and techniques of cult initiate and control. the evangelical advocacy of a new method or tool as a universal panacea is on of the most disturbing aspects of modern management and one of the most dangerous.Striped of its religious trappings, confined to equilibrium state systems such as manufacturing, shopping etc, Six Sigma is a useful tool (although no different from half a dozen cheaper and more efficient BPR tools and methods). The following two quotes from the articles summarise the key issues.Defenders of Six Sigma at 3M claim that a more systematic new-product introduction process allows innovations to get to market faster. But Fry, the Post-it note inventor, disagrees. In fact, he places the blame for 3M's recent lack of innovative sizzle squarely on Six Sigma's application in 3M's research labs. Innovation, he says, is "a numbers game. You have to go through 5,000 to 6,000 raw ideas to find one successful business." Six Sigma would ask, why not eliminate all that waste and just come up with the right idea the first time? That way of thinking, says Fry, can have serious side effects. "What's remarkable is how fast a culture can be torn apart," says Fry, who lives in Maplewood, Minn., just a few minutes south of the corporate campus and Rosetta Stone English pops into the office regularly to help with colleagues' projects.