Four Guesses Why Newt Gingrich Constantly Promotes “Six Sigma” Management Techniques During His Presidential Campaign
A close second to Newt’s kindergartners-as-janitors theme is the Six Sigma process. Newt’s constant recommendation of it to one and all as “the” approved way to improve business and governmental productivity and reliability is out-of-the-box thinking for him, but not in the usual way. With this Six Sigma enchantment, the man who promotes himself as a futurist behaves more like an archaeologist in the Death Valley of Management.
Below is a 2007 Bloomberg Businessweek article Six Sigma So Yesterday? that well describes the quite old-fashioned method it employs. It’s not been abandoned, but Six Sigma shows all the signs of age and impending exile, soon thereafter to be among the rocks left behind in the management process past. In fact, in origin, it was not very innovative at all. It’s techniques existed with different names, and not much else, throughout business history. . .
For an anecdotal example, here’s me. I worked nearly 25 years on Capitol Hill at the Congressional Research Service (CRS), and, previously, with for profit, nongovernmental companies as well. In all, various private and public organization management teams marched us through every technique from the Peter Principle to 60 Second Management to Management By Objectives (MBO). Once implemented, all were basically the same. All were found wanting.
Why? The poor morale of the workforce that pre-existed these efforts made employee “buy in” difficult. Additionally, these techniques were, in principle and effect, simply a retread of an old tire. Nothing new there. But for a new name, each replicated much the same concepts as the last one: a search for higher productivity and error-free results through close manipulation of the workforce. Innovation, in effect, was quashed by these efforts at control. Customer service suffered from time spent meeting non-customer needs of management “monitors.” Morale, consequently, declined. Products suffered. Clients and customers noticed. Adios 30 Second Management. Rewind.
Moreover, as we at Congressional Research Service (CRS) were legislative analysts, writers, and researchers (all geeks), this was an especially intrusive management technique, a better fit for automated assembly line manufacturing. The entire institution suffered, and still does. As you’ll read below, this, in essence, is Six Sigma. Those who use it today will look back in a decade and wonder what they were thinking.
This, of course, will occur as they implement another similar “best new thing.” There is a large industry that
- develops “new” management techniques that differ little, if at all, from the last development,
- devises new names for the technique and the many processes within the technique, and
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| “I’m smarter than my editor.” |
- engages consultants and business professors to promote the “newness” of the product.
Surely, Gingo The Magnificent, understands this. He’s no idiot, barely. Remember, he’s a self-styled futurist, completely. He once “futurized” the placement of huge mirrors in synchronous earth orbit to light up our highways. That’s not insane, mind you, that’s “futurism.” So Gingo’s smart enough, barely, to understand, or to have heard from someone smarter (like our blog turnip, at right), that Six Sigma is just another flawed management system among all other management systems that promised more than they could have possibly produced, employees being human beings and all. The article below about Six Sigma found this disenchantment nearly everywhere, and, for Heaven’s sake, it was published in mid-2007! To Newt, that’s normally archaeological information.
1. Six Sigma relies upon a Six Sigma training industry to produce consultants, trainers (“Master Black Belts,” “Black Belts,” “Green Belts,” and other Six Sig corporate pugilists), and trainers of trainers (perhaps called “Sensai”?) for companies interested in the process. Key word for Gingo? “Consultants.” My guess? He thinks Six Sigma might yield a variety of nice consulting gigs and training opportunities if he doesn’t attain the presidency (through no fault of his own, of course). With the Six Sigma believers, he’s pre-approved himself and his businesses to provide services to Fortune 100 companies. After all, it’s not unprecedented to mix business and running for the leader of the so-called free world. From the ‘git go he’s used his campaign as a book signing tour. Why not shill for Six Sigma?
2. Six Sigma thinking, despite its quickly approaching shelf life, appeals to the GOP establishment, the group Gingo needs to help blunt Romney’s appeal to that self-same group.
“Ahhhhh, I see that Gingrich lauds Six Sigma! The very method that Mr. and Mr.Koch employ to control the production process and their human capital. Yes, yes, I do like Newt’s thinking here. It matches my own. ‘Johnson! Cut him a check, and include one from yourself as well. Johnson . . . Johnson? . . . JOHNSON!‘”
3. Gingo enjoys toying with his audiences and debate contestants by confusing them with arcane or absurd references. Six Sigma was a term virtually unknown to the GOP base before Gingo added it to the lingo. Most of his supporters don’t understand what he’s talking about, and he never explains Six Sigma. He plays off his reputation among undereducated supporters who nearly always accept what he says without question. Gingo also understands they will be unlikely to Google “Six Sigma” when they arrive home. Among his misbegotten strengths among the GOP base is this perceived braininess. (It’s funny, though, since the base was produced from the seed of extreme anti-intellectualism.)
4. Gingrich never does anything unless he can gain financially from it. Period. Paragraph. He must be realizing a financial gain here too, now, not exclusively in the future. Is there a monied Six Sigma industry block out there with campaign cash to spend? That’s another likely guess. Gingo’s preening and pandering to them.
Finally, it would be interesting indeed to investigate just how Gingrich employs Six Sigma in his various organizations.
Here’s the 2007 article:
Now Nardelli’s successor, Frank Blake, another General Electric (GE ) alumnus, is dialing back on the Six Sigma rigor, giving more leeway to store managers to make decisions on their own. The story unfolding at Home Depot echoes closely what’s happening at 3M after James McNerney’s reign. There are signs of a similar pullback at many companies, even at GE, where CEO Jeff Immelt is trying to reprogram his management ranks to innovate around a theme of “ecomagination,” with mixed success. And at Young & Rubicam, where GE board member Ann Fudge flamed out as CEO after she tried to sell ad execs on Six Sigma.
So has the Six Sigma moment passed? “I think it has,” says Babson College management professor Tom Davenport. “Process management is a good thing. But I think it always has to be leavened a bit with a focus on innovation and [customer relationships].” The discipline was developed as a systematic way to improve quality, but the reason it caught fire was its effectiveness in cutting costs and improving profitability. That makes it a powerful tool—if those are a company’s goals. But as innovation becomes the cause du jour, companies are increasingly confronting the side effects of a Six Sigma culture.
Six Sigma clearly had a profound impact on the corporate world. According to the American Society for Quality, 82 of the 100 largest companies in the U.S. have embraced it. And that’s quickly trickling down: Six Sigma consultants are as busy as ever as the quality-improvement system migrates from its traditional focus on U.S. manufacturing companies to the financial-services industry and abroad. In recent years, companies as varied as DuPont (DD ), Textron (TXT ), Bank of America (BAC ), and Sun Microsystems (SUNW ) have all made Six Sigma bedrocks of their culture. Hybrid formulas have spawned, such as Lean Six Sigma and Design for Six Sigma. WCBF, an organization that organizes conferences about the process, has 14 events planned this year, up from seven last year.
But as its popularity endures, the notion of Six Sigma as a corporate cure-all is subsiding. Once a company has done the requisite belt-tightening, “the strategic needs of a business change,” says Robert Carter, a consultant at defense contractor Raytheon (RTN ). Kick-starting the top line becomes paramount; the best way there apart from an acquisition is innovation. At Raytheon, Carter is leading a Six Sigma effort to promote innovation. But while “most Six Sigma practitioners are very strong on the left brain, innovation very much starts in the right hemisphere,” says Carter. Even he, a Six Sigma expert, acknowledges the “define, measure, analyze, improve, control” mind-set doesn’t entirely gel with the fuzzy front-end of invention. When an idea starts germinating, Carter says, “you don’t want to overanalyze it,” which can happen in a traditional DMAIC framework.
Of course, Jack Welch has argued that a leader needs to single-mindedly inculcate Six Sigma into every corner of an organization. Should a CEO hedge and say, “Let’s do both Six Sigma and also be creative,” employees will tune out the part they don’t want to hear. Welch has said that even if the concept is applied in areas where perhaps it shouldn’t be, it’ll be worth it in the long run. It can always be fine-tuned once the workforce gets it. Call it the break-some-eggs-to-make-an-omelette approach.
Problem is, you don’t know which eggs you’re going to break. When Steve Bennett left GE in 2000 to take the CEO post at software maker Intuit (INTU ), he was eager to roll out Six Sigma. But he did it gingerly, pilot-testing the quality-improvement tool in certain groups for a year to prove its worth. He was unsure of how a Silicon Valley company would react, given its associations with Six Sigma—”most of them bad,” he says. So he cloaked the move under the benign-sounding banner of “process excellence,” deliberately avoiding using the name Six Sigma. Says Bennett, “The term gives me an allergic reaction.”
By Brian Hindo in New York, with Brian Grow in Atlantame Depot (HD ), ousted Chief Executive Robert Nardelli was devoted to Six Sigma. What next, Gingo? Please, keep ’em coming!
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