How Leaders Can Make A Crisis Worse
“Don’t you think it would be easier to ask the people doing the work?”
This question came from a union worker at an Indiana steel mill. He was thoroughly unimpressed with my plan to optimize his plant.
I worked for GE in 2000. Six Sigma was our secret weapon. Though Motorola introduced this process improvement methodology, Jack Welch made it famous. Jack made Six Sigma one of his signature initiatives, touting the cost-saving magic that helped GE beat earnings estimates like a drum.
Six Sigma was so closely tied to GE that we sold it to our biggest customers. For a fixed fee, we would attack your inefficient process with data. The process was defined by five words: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control.
Most every employee at GE was trained on Six Sigma in some fashion. We had a belt system like in martial arts. Getting a green belt was like earning a trophy in youth soccer, you just had to participate.
I karate-chopped my way through classes, leaving the GE dojo to take on my black belt project. Once obtained, GE could bill me out nearly as high as our most senior electrical engineers. This was nuts, of course.
