DMAIC, the Sig Sigma equivalent of the Ten Commandments, says it all. Define, measure, analyze, improve, control. All good news to drive efficiencies into a manufacturing process, 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 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 pops into the office regularly to help with colleagues' projects. "[McNerney] didn't kill it, because he wasn't here long enough. But if he had been here much longer, I think he could have."

Buckley, a PhD chemical engineer by training, seems to recognize the cultural ramifications of a process-focused program on an organization whose fate and history is so bound up in inventing new stuff. "You cannot create in that atmosphere of confinement or sameness," Buckley says. "Perhaps one of the mistakes that we made as a company—it's one of the dangers of Six Sigma—is that when you value sameness more than you value creativity, I think you potentially undermine the heart and soul of a company like 3M."