Imagine a consultant said to you: "I'm a con man. Give me $70,000 and I'll show you how to use smoke and mirrors to deceive others".
Would you hand over your company's cash? Of course you would. This is exactly what happened. Tens of thousands bought into Harry's Six Sigma Scam. He famously said:
"Six Sigma Champions are con men. All you have is smoke and mirrors"
If and when you realize you have drunk Kool Aid, what do you do? Your salary now depends on your worthless colored belt of gullibility. Do you tell your boss "I made a mistake. I now realize Six Sigma is built on fraud." ? Thankfully, many have shown the integrity to do just that! These are the men that companies should value, not the weak and ignorant; not the con men and 'yes men'.
Of course many more value their income more than their integrity. Many realize the fraud but continue to promote it for personal profit.
How did Harry deceive so many people? Harry even lied on his LinkedIn profile about his qualifications. Harry knew nothing about Quality. For example, he said ZERO about control charts, at the heart of quality.
The key to Harry selling his "smoke and mirrors" was great marketing. The start was what he called the "pillar" of his scam, that was totally outrageous but appealed to simple minds. He then wrote a long "treatise" as he called it, to supposedly back it up.
Harry relied on obfuscation and unreferenced acronyms to make it difficult and very time consuming for anyone to check. He didn't expect there would be people like me who did read his trash in detail and expose his scam:
Then there were the belts. They were a clever idea. They are a leash to keep milking gullible folk who put a low cost toe in the water. Build apparent prestige based on farce and fraud. Belts build divisiveness. They are a disaster for companies.
It was then just a matter of padding out the scam and the belts with whatever could be found, no matter how irrelevant to process improvement.
It is sad that scams like Six Sigma hang on for years, and are only tossed in the trash when some new CEO such as GE's Larry Culp decides to make a name for himself by buying into the next fad on the block. Being seen to be doing something new is more important than recognizing the $23B loss that Six Sigma caused the company. It is rare to see people having the kahoonas to stand up and say "the emperor has no clothes".
Eventually the Six Sigma Scam will be totally replaced by other worthless fads. I feel it is unlikely that QUALITY as built by the giants such as Dr Shewhart, Professor Ishikawa, Professor Lewis, Professor Deming, Dr Taguchi and Dr Wheeler, will ever prevail. The Google Trend graph shows Six Sigma's demise from around the time I first started exposing it.
by Dr Tony Burns BE (Hon 1) PhD (Chem Eng)