![]() Corporate culture: Successfully integrating Six Sigma into an organisation will lead to better communication between managers and employees, since everyone will speak a common language based on the Six Sigma model.Introducing these metrics enables companies to have a clearer idea of their customers’ needs and to target these needs specifically. Increased value: By implementing the Six Sigma method, companies increase their value for customers.After all, companies need to understand their customers’ needs if they want to be able to obtain economically beneficial results from their processes. Customer satisfaction: Six Sigma places high value on the customer’s perspective.This is due to the processes being clearly structured and providing a basis for continuous improvement as well as for keeping up with changes in market conditions. Sustainability: These methods enable companies to achieve success over the long term.There are five key advantages commonly associated with Six Sigma: Although the main focus of Six Sigma is reducing the error rate, companies that restructure their organisation around these principles benefit from additional (and sometimes indirect) advantages as well. Winning the quarter often requires the elimination of variance, but winning the long game will require embracing it. Success requires embracing the alternative paths that markets randomly present to us in order to find your organization’s own unique place to grow and thrive. Yet variation is also not an obstacle to steadfastly avoid it is a key to unlocking your breakthrough future. Those organizations who have successfully shielded themselves from variation and experimentation – those who have attained literal mastery of Six Sigma, ultimately face the greater risk of bunking up with the Neurospora – inhabiting the same kind of eternal biological status quo.Įliminating variation in a large organization can be a laudable goal, leading to profit and efficiency. Innovators are forced to create “fantasy plans” – with unrealistic and inflexible assumptions - to win approval for their projects. Managers are promoted based on having the right answers, not asking the right questions. Experimentation, and the possibility of negative outcomes, becomes taboo. As leaders, we court alternative paths and new growth opportunities, but like the Neurospora, the culture quickly wraps around these ambitions and smothers them.Ī culture built on the foundation of eliminating variance can have dramatically negative effects on growth and innovation. But there's an older, efficiency-driven part of the culture that fights like hell to defend the status quo. Listen to any CEO these days, and at first glance, they would seem to be the opposite of this variation-averse type – leading organizations that are built for innovation and entrepreneurship. As biologist Olivia Judson delicately puts it, "Its use of mutations to defend from variation may have inadvertently blocked off some evolutionary paths." ![]() And yet, Neurospora is still, after all, only a bread mold. ![]() Among the designations of mastery for Six Sigma, Neuospora would certainly be considered a “Black Belt”. To be sure, the process works: Neurospora has relentlessly protected itself from variation over hundreds of millions of years. Neurospora crassa is a species of bread mold that is so averse to variance that whenever a large segment of its DNA gets duplicated – a critical step in genetic evolution – it bombards the copy with what are known as "point mutations" that effectively turn the genetic code into nonsense. Now let’s consider an organism that took a different evolutionary path. ![]()
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