The Six Sigma Revolution chronicles the pragmatic journey through a new management approach that is helping drive improved productivity and profits.

Six Sigma is a quantitative approach that fuels improved effectiveness and efficiency in an organization. This approach was first created in the 1980s by Motorola. Then, in the 1990s, companies like AlliedSignal and General Electric contributed to making Six Sigma the most popular quality improvement methodology in history.

This book is different than any other on the market. Rather than tout how important Six Sigma is, The Six Sigma Revolution addresses those executives and implementers interested in creating and sustaining a Six Sigma initiative in their organization.

This book begins with a discussion of the quality movement in the twentieth century, describing the limitations with previous efforts, and how Six Sigma came to be the management approach of choice for those interested in making their organizations world class.

What makes Six Sigma different, in part, is its focus on the involvement of management at all levels of an organization. This book 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.

The journey through the tactical aspects of Six Sigma begins with how to charter teams so they are working on processes that directly impact the strategic business objectives of the organization. Later chapters address how to calculate sigma at the process level, how to create specific, measurable problem statements that the project team will then attempt to improve, as well as how to utilize the analysis and improvement tools that will assist teams in their efforts to improve sigma performance. The final tactical chapter describes how a team transfers an improved process so that improvement will be sustained over time.

Another aspect of this book that you will not see elsewhere is the recognition of managing cultural change in the Six Sigma initiative. Six Sigma initiatives involve a cultural transformation toward managing with facts and data. For some organizations, this transformation will be a dramatic change from current management methods. It is probable that there will be resistance. This book addresses four major types of resistance, indicating how to diagnose the type of resistance and then providing strategies to overcome resistance.

The later chapters provide both executives and implementers with methods on how to sustain Six Sigma initiatives. The reader will learn how to create and manage Business Quality Councils where management has continuing responsibilities for the success of Six Sigma within their organization. We discuss how to change the systems and structures of an organization so that Six Sigma is successful.

Finally, the last chapter addresses 10 ways in which Six Sigma initiatives fail. Each failure is discussed to illustrate how to overcome failure to create a Six Sigma success story.