Six Sigma and Innovation
by Miki SaxonI’m a long way from being a Six Sigma guru, my knowledge of it comes mainly from reading articles, since the mid-Eighties when it first started at Motorola, about companies that have embraced it.
The stories about how it turns companies around are legion, but if you follow the same companies over many years, it becomes obvious that using an unadulterated version yields great short-term results, but long-term it can hurt.
Why? Because Six Sigma, and similar metrics, impact culture, in fact, in many case they become the culture. Innovation doesn’t lend itself to rigorous measurement and creativity, especially breakthrough next-gen thinking, is difficult to quantify, let alone determine its ROI at inception.
That doesn’t mean that you want to ignore what Six Sigma, or other rigorous metrics, can do for your organization. It does mean that you need to apply them where they work best, while protecting and enhancing a culture that manages risk, invites ideas and celebrates failure.
Symbol Technology is a great case study of a company, known for continual innovation, that lost it, and got it back—
“It involves an ex-CEO who is on the lam in Europe, a former Cisco Systems executive brought in to patch the company back together with Six Sigma glue, and a Wall Street guy who tried to inject risk back into a culture that had leached it out.” It’s “…about the fragility of innovation and how easily it can be lost, even with the best of intentions.”
It’s about rebuilding a culture that garners ideas from all sources, balances the associated risks and refills its innovation pipeline.
It’s also a good reminder that there are no silver bullets; no one concept/approach/discipline with which to run your company; and that a myopic focus on the short-term is likely to kill you in the long-term.
February 27th, 2013 at 1:16 am
[…] Companies that focus on metrics often lose their innovation mojo. […]