Why would anyone turn their backs on the giants of Quality for the lunacy of a con man?
Professor Lewis was a philosopher. He laid the foundations for Professor Deming and Dr Shewhart's thinking. His work formed the foundation to Professor Deming's "System of Profound Knowledge".
Dr Shewhart had a PhD in Physics and founded the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He created a revolution with his departure from traditional statistics with his Control Chart, to form the basis of Quality. Most people still fail to understand that his charts are not probability charts.
Dr Shewhart's revolution was that his charts do not depend on a data model, nor any assumptions about the process. They do not depend on data normality. They are economic charts that give workers alerts, as to when to investigate assignable causes.
The key difference between Dr Shewhart's control charts and traditional statistics, is Prediction. Time is irrelevant with traditional statistics. However, the same data with different time order gives totally different results with Control Charts.
Professor Deming had a degree in engineering. He was awarded a masters and later a doctorate in mathematical physics from Yale. He became Professor of Statistics at NYU and Professor in Management at Columbia. Professor Deming built on Dr Shewhart and Professor Lewis' work. He laid the foundations for Quality, with his 14 points, SoPK, and 7 Deadly Diseases.
Dr Wheeler was mentored by Professor Deming for 2 decades. He made many great contributions to Quality, including validating Dr Shewhart's assertions; showing Rule #1 is all that is needed for Process Behavior Charts; and that XmR charts are a replacement for np, p, c and u charts.
Mention should also be made of Dr Chambers who worked with Professor Deming and Dr Wheeler. He taught SPC to Ford at the time Professor Deming was dragging them from disaster.
By contrast, Six Sigma was created by Mikel Harry, a man who stated "Six Sigma champions are con men. All you have is smoke and mirrors. Six Sigma is a snow job." Harry was not an engineer. He was not a statistician. Harry had no clue about quality. In hundreds of pages of writing, he has no discussion whatsoever about control charts.
Harry lied about his qualifications on his LinkedIn profile. He forgot to mention his arts degree. He forgot to mention his higher degree was in Seconadry Education, from Mary Lou Teachers College. He faked his degree on his profile. Harry advocated using smoke and mirrors to hide the truth. He put this into effect with his intentional obfuscation to hide the truth about the origins of his laughable Six Sigma, based on Bender's tolerance in stacks.
In summary, on one hand we have the giants of quality with expertise in statistics, philosophy, engineering and management. One the other, we have a self confessed con man. WHY did so many people choose the con man?
by Dr Tony Burns BE (Hon 1) PhD (Chem Eng)