Month: January 2009

If your customers rate you a “7” on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the best), do your customer ratings range from 6 to 8 or do they range from 4 to 10? What would you do with this information?

AIG Said to Offer $1 Billion in Retention Payments to Employees As it turns out, this how AIG is choosing to spend part of the $150 Billion it received from the US Government, with much of it going to the very business units that caused AIG to falter in the first place. While the company […]

Photos stream of the iSixSigma Live! Summit and Awards in Miami. To browse all photos and download your favorites visit: http://photos.isixsigma.com/gallery/7136980_gHfnR

It seems like a month can not go by without some large scale food recall, with the latest being approximately 31 million pounds of peanut butter (due to salmonella contamination). I started to wonder what the sigma level for the aforementioned peanut butter would look like. According to a major news website, at least 500 […]

Michael Cyger moderated a panel with Mikel Harry and Don Linsenmann. Together they put on a good show, fielding questions from Mike as well as the audience. Don, as usual, instill humor into just about every story he tells. On the economy and Six Sigma: Don: “We’re all impacted by this downfall. Take initiative. Let […]

As an iSixSigma Blogs reader I invite you to participate in iSixSigma’s latest survey on Six Sigma in the supply chain. This short survey will explore how Six Sigma and other process improvement methodologies, including supply chain models such as SCOR, are being used to optimize supply chain activities. It will also look at how […]

Over 200 energy industry professionals will gather in Houston, Texas, May 19-22 for iSixSigma Live’s premiere Energy Forum for Process Excellence, supported by Chevron, Halliburton, Hess and Marathon Oil. Here’s your chance to be one of the speakers. Click here for the speaking proposal form: https://www.isixsigma.com/KQ5 We’re especially looking for process improvement professionals who can […]

I spent the Wednesday afternoon in the Deployment Models breakout session with Bob Crescenzi, from NewPage, Pam Cagle from Wal-Mart, and Stephen Turnipseed from Chevron. Each company is deploying Six Sigma with a different approach. Bob Crescenzi made a great point kicking off the discussions. He said, “There is no vanilla deployment.” Top-down, middle-out, or […]

“Do you have the courage to lead?”

I was very honored to have been nominated for the iSixSigma MVP Award for “Best Blogger” – given the high quality of my fellow nominees, Robin Barnwell and Gianna Clark, I was not expecting to receive this recognition! Attending the iSixSigma Live! conference was a blast, and I had a lot of fun and met […]

The iSixSigma Live! Miami Summit and Awards opened yesterday with a bang.Richard Willet, Jr., President and CEO of NewPage kicked off the morning session. Rick gave an enthusiastic overview of Lean Six Sigma at NewPage. There was so much he spoke about, but one of the points really stuck me as unique. He said that […]

Well we did it. We announced the order of the Top Ten iSixSigma Best Places to Work list this morning. If you were following my tweets this morning you already heard where the No. 1 place is… if not, here we go… #10 Rio Tinto Alcan #9 Volt Information Sciences Inc. #8 EMC Corp. #7 […]

I had the privilege of presenting the iSixSigma MVP Awards this morning to a fine group of Six Sigma professionals. The MVP Awards are iSixSigma’s way of recognizing those people who volunteer their time and expertise making iSixSigma.com and the iSixSigma Blogosphere meaningful places to learn. Without purse or script, these knights and nobles selfishly […]

The iSixSigma Live! Awards ceremony went off beautifully this morning. Congratulations to all the finalists, and woo hooo! to all the winners! Winners: Largest-Breakthrough Improvement Projects * Environment – Bell Helicopter, Textron Inc. for “Compressed Air Savings Headstart (CASH)” * Supply chain – General Dynamics for “Submarine Material Receipt Inspection” * Transactional – North Shore-LIJ […]

Targets appear in all shapes & sizes. Sometimes seen as positive, “we operate a target-driven culture” and sometimes negative, “targets drive the wrong behaviour”. So what is true? Given the sheer diversity of targets, I want to focus on a specific area, daily work targets in a services environment. Let’s look at a scenario. Imagine […]

It’s a busy week for us here at iSixSigma. The final day leading to the iSixSigma Live! Summit& Awards in Miami… If you tweet you’re in for a treat.I’ll betweeting live from Miami. Follow the iSixSigma tweetfor mini updates on what I’m up to at the conference. Be the first to readthe winners of the […]

Happy New Year! Today, rather than talk about something deeply insightful I thought I would share one of the tools I like to use. Ever had to arrange a project meeting? Did you need to get say 10 people’s diaries aligned, usually at short notice? Was it fun? There are many ways to approach this […]

While scanning news for lean and six sigma related articles this morning, I came across this gem: “Six Sigma Certification Booms as Employment Busts” – it was actually a press release posing as news over on msnbc.com. That’s fine – I recall from my days in media relations that many news outlets craved pre-written content, […]

This year, I’m making a resolution to do a good deed daily. This is inspired in part by Gianna Clark’s latest blog, How W.O.W.?, but also by my own sense of imbalance in the customer feedback that most organizations receive. I’ve communicated about problems and complaints many times – but – I realized that I […]