Mikel Harry was the creator of Six Sigma. Harry's PhD was in secondary school education, awarded in 1984 by the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. [Verified by Records and Enrollment Services].
Harry was NOT a statistician. He was NOT an engineer.
Harry was NOT a quality expert. His hundreds of pages of writing have no mention of Process Behavior Charts, nor any discussion of Control Charts. These are at the heart of Quality.
Harry's lack of quality expertise is shown in his statement: "I am not an engineer. I have to admit I did not know what Bill [Smith] was talking about".
Harry's client Jack Welch later made a similar statement "no one in the room had any idea what he [Harry] was talking about". Jack in his book, "Straight from the Gut", described Harry as "a madman".
Harry based his Six Sigma on a claim by his workmate, Mr Bill Smith. Mr Smith had a moulding process that happened to drift "as much as 1.5 sigma" because he tampered with it. Harry claimed Bill's shift happened for all processes, based on the tolerance in the height of a stack of discs. He describes this in his "Mysteries of Six Sigma" https://lnkd.in/gNh32-wQ
"The magnitude of inflation imposed on the instantaneous reproducibility with a compensatory constant used to correct the sustained reproducibility for the effect of non random manufacturing errors, which perturbs the process center."
Harry called his 1.5 sigma shift the "pillar" of Six Sigma. He described his 1.5 sigma as a "long term shift" that is supposed to happen every 50 samples for every process, everywhere..
Harry later seemed to realize his error in Six Sigma's foundation. In his "Shifty Business" article, he admitted "opponents of the shift factor are absolutely correct".
Perhaps Harry's most famous admissions (from his "Six Sigma Story") were:
"Six Sigma champions are con men"
"All you have is smoke and mirrors"
"Smoke can also be used to cover areas you want to hide from view"
Finally, Harry in his "Ask Harry": "Adding Lean to Six Sigma is like adding "water to potassium""
RIP
by Dr Tony Burns BE (Hon 1) PhD (Chem Eng)