Six Sigma Evolution Clarified-Letter to the Editor

Mr. Laux's letter to the editor is interesting, but wrong. Giving Mikell all the credit is a fable. I worked within the Government Electronics Group and I can tell you that tremendous gains were made and we had vertually no interaction with Mikell. I went on to work with Motorola's Automotive Group, which has been documented as improving much more rapidly than the Government Group and Mikell was not even known there untill I introduced him to the management at the beginning of his tenure with the Research Institue. They changed absolutely nothing based on this contact.

As anyone knows that has ever been involved in change, the real credit belongs to a lot of people. The training materials being used by the Academy, ASQ, BMG, and almost all of the big corporations come from a man from Automotive named Steve Zinkgraf - not Mikell as his "intellectual property" was basically unusable as training material. Go look at the stuff from ASQ, they were sloppy enough to even leave some files created by one of the founders of BMG in their training materials.

Thanks to Mr. Laux for trying to perpetuate the misleading information of Mikell being the creator of this. He just happens to have been a great marketeer amoung a group of introverted engineers. If Mr. Laux would like me to show him the origin of his training materials, I will be quite happy to show him.