from the trademarked-thing-losing-its-luster dept.
Dave Lindorff reports via CounterPunch
Over a generation ago, engineer Bill Smith, working at Motorola, developed a management system called Six-Sigma, designed to help companies avoid quality problems in their products and business processes. His system caught morphed[sic] into a general theory of management, and became a catch-word and marketing goldmine at business schools as well as requirement for promotion at large corporations.
In 1995, Jack Welsh, CEO of GE, made Six-Sigma central to his company's whole management approach. If you wanted to be promoted at that leading Fortune 100 industrial firm, you needed to be certified in Six-Sigma. Other companies followed suit and today most large US corporations and many abroad, as well as some public organizations (including the US military), claim to adhere to the model, and to promote management personnel based upon their having achieved so-called "black belt" or "green belt" status in understanding its precepts.
Indeed, GE's success in growing rapidly and achieving record profits year after year made Welsh and Six-Sigma (a trademarked term owned by Motorola) a leading model for top-level managers everywhere.
Jump forward, though, and GE is now being called an epic management disaster by analysts. The company, with Welsh at the helm, famously expanded into banking and financial services, got caught with its corporate pants down in the Fiscal Crisis and Great Recession that hit in 2007, and is now going through a wrenching divestment and break-up process that has seen its stock price fall from a high of $87 a share in August of 2000, when everything seemed to be humming along nicely, to today's low of $12.88, a level that valued the company at 50% of what it had been worth just a year ago.
Last week, in a final indignity, the company, which had been one of the original Dow Industrial Average listings when that index was created back in 1896, was kicked off that widely followed list of Wall Street's largest and most important firms, embarrassingly replaced by the pharmacy chain Walgreens.
[...] Welsh noted that his performance as a manager would be judged not by what happened to the company under his watch, but by how it did in the decades after his departure.
The answer is now in: disastrously.
The same actually can be said about many of the US companies that adopted Welsh's vaunted Six-Sigma model for strategic management.
The question then, is why nobody in business journalism is questioning Six-Sigma.
[...] the company has become an object lesson in why both Six-Sigma and GE's approach to growth by acquisition and diversification should be viewed with great suspicion.
And yet, instead there is just silence.
[...] US politicians of both major parties, and especially Republicans, are quick to say that government agencies should be run more "like a business". The Trump administration has taken that even further, putting actual businesspeople in charge of many of the government's key departments and agencies. Are these department secretaries and agency heads going to be applying the discredited GE Six-Sigma model to the government operations they direct?
[...] It sure would be great if the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the DEA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Land [Management], and the Commerce Department, at least, could get the GE treatment.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @06:42AM (39 children)
... and you choose to pick on a management model?
Six-Sigma may or may not be crap, but come on! I think a much larger part of the problem is that humans have built incredibly complex, interconnected, global economies around these money-manipulating, warmongering monopolies on violence, who fund their escapades not by doing a service in exchange for voluntarily paid compensation, but rather who by pointing a gun to people's faces and saying calmly "Pay up, or you get the Cage. Do your Fair Share, comrade."
Yeah. Dave. Lindorff.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 02 2018, @07:24AM (14 children)
Ehhh, I never thought much of Sigma Six anyway. Old lessons, rephrased, really don't add a whole lot to the game. When they seem to poorly rephrased, something is lost. But, Sigma was all the rage with new college grads, a few top dogs in corporations decided they liked it - and Sigma becomes a big thing.
I guess what made Sigma so palatable is, it doesn't make much of ethics. The low ethical standards you mention fit Sigma well.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 5, Interesting) by anubi on Monday July 02 2018, @07:47AM (11 children)
I have a strong feeling it wasn't six-sigma that did them in... rather it was lousy implementation.
The concept of "doing a good job" has been around for ages... but it changes names about like we change fashion.
For me, it was first "a stitch in time saves nine", then "the Taguchi Method", where statistics and variances concerning production environments were introduced, which I think is obvious to any craftsman, but it needed a name. It seemed to morph into ISO-9001.
Then all the management models. Do any of them really work as a model, or is it the man? I have worked under excellent managers, and I have had those who rapidly killed off any enthusiasm I could generate on the job.
They seem to have a name for everything. Management by Objectives... Deming Methods... now Six Sigma.
From my chair, it looks like GE did the same as every large organization or political entity I have ever studied does... all the incompetence but Ferrengi-like behaviour rises to the top, gets in control, and steers the whole organization into incompetence, as political needs of the ruling class override the basic driving forces of the economics supporting the organization... that is meeting the needs of the customer.
A glaring example to me today is to look at our computational infrastructure, designed by those having a need to "lock in" ( business word meaning "to entrap") their customer.
It goes on for so long, like the Tower of Babel in the Bible, until sufficient stress builds up and it collapses.
Its the same thing, happening over and over and over.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday July 02 2018, @09:33AM (1 child)
FTFY.
Quality done right in an org require the knowledge on what actually the org is doing. A formal approach to process engineering helps, but is not sufficient.
Unfortunately, formal processes are absolutely sufficient for muddling the water with metrics complexity and, more important, for ass covering, blame games and other corporate olympic games.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday July 02 2018, @10:09AM
That is a beautiful FTFY. Thanks!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday July 02 2018, @10:04AM (1 child)
They went from making stuff (computers, aero engines, power generation equipment) to finance.
They knew how to make stuff- good stuff.
They thought they could make more money being a bank.
Banks are good at that (well, not all of them)
GE.. wasn't.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday July 02 2018, @04:33PM
They were no better or worse than other banks. They hired the same kind of people other banks and financial services firms did. Other such operations that were purely about banking/finance such as Washington Mutual or Lehman Brothers went under, too. Shit happens.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @01:26PM (2 children)
6-sigma means 1 error in a billion. This makes sense if you are building computer chips with 100million parts (gates), not so much when you are building widgets with 80 parts and a long supply chain with a bunch of humans involved at every step. Just try going about your day without making a mistake of any kind. A human lifespan is ~25,000 days. Now go through 40 lifespans without making a single mistake. Ever.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by anubi on Monday July 02 2018, @02:00PM (1 child)
Each thing may have hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of little parts.
Statistically, even though each individual part may look good, the assemblage may not look good at all.
Each part has to be made extremely consistent for the whole shebang to come out looking good.
If you control your inputs, keeping your stuff in tolerance, it isn't all that hard to make perfect product. But all it takes is one piece of crap somewhere and the whole load becomes crap.
Just one tiny connector in your car failing will really mess up your day.
When I was working at Chevron, my boss handed me a copy of "In Search of Excellence", and told me to read it, and if I would follow its teachings, he and I would get along together fine. I still have that copy.
Everything I have seen since looked like derivatives from that book, with mathematical augmentation to the common sense presented in it.
However, history records that the companies so glorified in the book did not fare all that well either. But still, personally, I sure feel a lot better knowing I earned my way by doing something useful. It gave me a much more peaceful outlook on life than knowing I got my stuff by swindling someone else. Its a personal thing with me, even if I cannot seem to find proof that doing something conscientiously beats pulling fast ones.
Its a "God Thing" with me. Somehow, I feel compelled to do things this way. Somehow, I feel accountable for what I have done, and don't wanna face the music for pulling fast ones. I'd rather die a pauper than be surrounded with swindled goods, and it looks like I'm gonna get my wish.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @02:44PM
> ... Its a "God Thing" with me.
Have you read, "Round the Bend" by Nevil Shute? Based on your comment, I think you would enjoy it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday July 02 2018, @01:52PM (1 child)
"The concept of "doing a good job" has been around for ages... but it changes names about like we change fashion."
This. It's just like Scrum, or Devops, or Agile: stuff that any really good team already does, in one way or another. Maybe other good teams can copy an idea or two, and make themselves even better. But try to formalize "doing a good job" and impose in on bad teams? They're still bad, only now they're bad with a method.
Anyway, from what I can see, six-sigma is the same thing for management: take a good team, and it will work (because the team is good). Take a bad team, and G...it's still a bad team. GE's team today is not the same as it was decades ago.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @03:33PM
If one of the production server's power supply has caught fire, best practice is to schedule a meeting to determine whether DevOps should fix this, or the software team should issue a software patch to correct the problem in order that we can close this ticket as quickly as possible.
Thank goodness the 1st amendment forces people to listen to you and agree with you.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday July 02 2018, @02:55PM (1 child)
When you get to be the size of a GE, or a Motorola, or Verizon, etc. one of the biggest challenges is keeping the ship going forward in the "right" direction. ("Right" is complex and requires unpacking, but I won't digress.) Inconsistent management methodology is such an organization can be as damaging (if not more so) than lack of technical knowledge. A program like Six Sigma, Agile, Waterfall (management methodologies, all) when applied company-wide establish a framework that can apply across a company and give consistency to operational methods. But that requires buy-in not just on a "yep, we did the scrum" task level, but also a motivational/principle level. It is really tempting to forgo the management bullshit bingo and think "hey, just get good people who can manage their teams however they want...." But in the end those models do keep enterprise organizations operating with a degree of consistency that can't otherwise be achieved for longer periods than otherwise. (If it made more money and bonuses to let everyone do their own thing.... that's what you would see.)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday July 02 2018, @06:04PM
You've got one part of the problem, but consider:
Some tasks may be better managed by one management model, and other tasks by a different one.
I'm not sure that a unified management model is always a good idea. In fact, I think it may often be a terrible idea. But to judge each case, you need to understand each case.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @09:18AM (1 child)
We know, Runaway, it is obvious from your posts. Don't let that stop you, though! Think of SN as the Para-Olympics for you, after you have been banned from everywhere else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @10:56AM
Please, list the sites from which Runaway has been banned. Obviously, if we have the data available from those sites, we can have him committed. List the sites, and the reasons for being banned from them, give us some leverage!
(Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Monday July 02 2018, @07:38AM (14 children)
Agreed, Casting Six Sigma and, by implication, ISO 9000 under the buss without regard for world events, the economic meltdown, and the natural cyclicality of business is dumb. The fact that GE is probably losing out to other companies, many of whom are Six-Sigma believers themselves never seems to register. Sometimes you lose because the other guys really are THAT much better than you.
But you can see why this story might appeal to Gewg_ because anything having to do with corporate business methods grinds his grits. It would be so much better if every decision was take to the shopfloor for a meeting of all the high school drop outs make the choices.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anubi on Monday July 02 2018, @08:04AM (6 children)
You know, the guy on the shop floor likely knows more about how to do his thing than anyone else in the organization. Especially if he's been doing it for years. What it it that people think social status overrides competency?
No, I would not put it past, say, the mechanic who works on my van to design my transmission controller. That's my thing. But I would take his advice in high esteem to tell me if he thinks its working right once its in. He would "feel" things that aren't right and will lead to structural failure. He's been working on transmissions his whole life, and knows far more than me about how one should work and what will destruct them - he will sense things I would never see on my test equipment, that is, if I was even aware of what to set it up to look for.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @08:21AM (3 children)
Yeah. Long ago I worked out how to be an effective engineering consultant -- look for the person on the shop floor that knows what's going on, ask them what's good and what needs work. Then take that info up to management, since internal communication rarely works in the "up" direction. I was always happy to tell the managers who I learned from, but they were rarely interested. If there isn't anyone on the shop floor or in some supporting group like plant engineering who knows what's going on, the operation is probably on the way down.
Richard Feynman obviously knew this -- when appointed to the Challenger investigation (space shuttle crash) he was the only one on the commission who went to the assembly area to interview the people that built the rockets & engines--
http://www.feynman.com/science/the-challenger-disaster/ [feynman.com]
Fortune cookie seems appropriate:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. -- John Keats
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 02 2018, @11:12AM (2 children)
We are doing something weird and different at work. I've never seen or heard it before, but your post sounds kinda close.
Each year, Corporate does a survey of it's employees. I've been caught in a Catch-22 because I couldn't enter the information they wanted, regarding *my* supervisor. That is, the design of the questionnaire was - uhhh - twisted, I guess, so that it reflected on management as a whole, in most places. I complained that *my* input should reflect on *my* supervisor, not on management as a whole.
Someone listened. The most recent survey reveals that as a group, our plant management does an adequate job. However, *my* supervisor's rating ranks somewhere between the sewer and the abyss.
As a result, we are having some meetings, in which, we are trying to spell out what is wrong, and how to fix them.
I don't expect a helluva lot from it. For starters, the man is nucking phutts. Some kind of schizo bullshit, he can't stay on track for ten minutes, and won't allow you to do so either. Second - HR is in charge of the meetings. Fek - gotta clean up your language, and talk carefully, so most of the guys would rather stay quiet. There are two of us in the meetings though, who are willing and able to shine the light of reason on all the stupid behind-the-scenes shit.
The question is, will any of this have an effect on day-to-day operations?
TBH, this supervisor really doesn't mess with me a lot. He went through a little spell, when everything everyone said to him was "disrespectful". He left me an idiot note one day, and I took it to HR, showind her how "disrespectful" the "young puppy" was to his elders. We went round and round over that one - if it had been recorded it probably would have looked like a Laurel and Hardy act.
But, I do get tired of listening to a near-moron run at the mouth all the time. Maybe, just maybe, things will improve . . .
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday July 02 2018, @02:29PM (1 child)
Sometimes, all you can do is shut up and watch the train wreck.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @03:36PM
The light bulb replacement was not scheduled in this sprint.
Thank goodness the 1st amendment forces people to listen to you and agree with you.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday July 02 2018, @02:46PM (1 child)
This is why engineers with real world experience are valuable. By the time I got my first engineering job, I had 15 years experience in the field as a hobby.
An old coworker from the Apollo days told me a story about the V2 (he was an old Nazi). The Germans were having trouble building pumps for the engines and Hitler did a countrywide search for someone who could come up with a design and it was found that fire departments already had something that would meet the requirements.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:02AM
I read that fire pump story somewhere, maybe in Walter Dornberger's book, "V2" (also a Nazi who wound up at Bell Aircraft/Aerospace.) Think about the flow rate if they needed fire pumps to feed the rocket engine...
There is no mention of forced/slave labor in "V2" which focuses almost exclusively on the technology development, but a friend's father worked at Bell. I asked and he was certain that, as a high level manager, Dornberger was aware of working conditions in the 3rd Reich rocket factories.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Monday July 02 2018, @11:54AM (1 child)
ISO 9000 / 9001 can become (does become?) an exercise in learning the very specific, optimal hoops to jump through to satisfy the ISO auditor when they visit (and also any internal auditor or manager wearing their ISO hat). Because the auditing process differs somewhat from the old-fashioned, commonsense, checking that a good job is being done, these hoops will actually hinder the job being done well. The process is always going to differ from that because of its nature as a generic standard to be applied to all fields of work and because the action of auditing can only sample a small fraction of the work done and is often done by someone that lacks intimate knowledge of the work itself. You can try to fight that by increasing the amount of internal auditing but that makes things worse because the employee spends more time trying to justify their actions than actually doing any real work so any potential gains in profitability are obliterated.
I know little about Six Sigma but I'm willing to bet that most of what I said above applies to that too. You can't drop in a management process as a replacement for having a competent leader that knows their employees' trade intimately and expect success.
"rancid randy has a dialogue with herself[...] Somebody help him!" -- Anonymous Coward.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @01:36PM
When a company I worked for was going through the iso9000 certification process, we were literally told to lie. The word 'lie' was used in our coaching training sessions.
We were told to say things about the work process that were in 180 opposition of how things were really structured. No one believed the company could get certification simply from the fact that it was so contrary to the way things truly were. But they did.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday July 02 2018, @01:07PM (4 children)
ISO-9000 NEEDS to be thrown under a bus. Fun fact, if I document that the procedure after completing the assembly of my product, the assembler is to fling it across the plant such that it hits a concrete wall and lands in the "completed pile", my company will pass ISO-9000 as long as the assemblers all follow that procedure. If any are caught carefully placing the product in a neat stack, I fail.
All of this crap is based on the unexamined assumption that given sufficient procedures and paperwork, the village idiot will be just as capable as Albert Einstein when doing theoretical physics.
But what actually happens, of course, is that if you force Albert Einstein into such a system, his work output will closely resemble that of the village idiot.
If you enter a modern corporate workplace and see the various "motivational" posters and reminders about flavor of the day management methodologies with their veneration of vaguely positive phrases and loaded words, and you listen very carefully, you can almost hear "Hotel California" playing in the background. It is EXACTLY the way cult brainwashing works, it's just not as well implemented (usually).
WARNING: Once you see it, you can never un-see it.
(Score: 1) by ekerin on Monday July 02 2018, @06:33PM (2 children)
The purpose of ISO900X is not to ensure you make good products. It's to help you make products consistently.
Through that consistency you can make sure you do it correctly, and know when you don't make it correctly. I'm not saying it's perfect, and it does have major issues. Like all good ideas - people morph it to become something it's not, or implement it without care in order to have a stamp of approval - without actually buying into the purpose.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday July 02 2018, @06:54PM (1 child)
Supposedly yes, but see my comments about the village idiot.
And of course the many many examples of manufacturers claiming ISO9000 as some sort of quality guarantee.
(Score: 1) by ekerin on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:36PM
With that, I completely agree :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Wednesday July 04 2018, @08:01AM
My impression of ISO9000 is that it wants everybody in an organization to behave as an AI-devoid bot. The advantage is that everybody becomes replaceable. The advantage is thus a matter of society reshaping, not any economic advance. Whatever other competitor whose people feel empowered by responsibility would eat their lunch in a free market. But the free market does not exist as soon as the first bank prints the first banknote not backed by real goods.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Dr Spin on Monday July 02 2018, @08:59AM (7 children)
I am not too familiar with 6-sigma, but I have been involved in three ISO-9000 implementations. It really just
I can't see how that could get you into much trouble. The trouble is caused by:
Separately the US and UK economies, and probably a lot of others, are reverting to slavery - where people at the bottom are paid so little they have zero "disposable income" as survival disposes of their entire income, while those at the top cruise around in private jets and yachts.
In the UK, this is worsened by a social security scheme that means the rich are subsidized by payments which they get from those on medium income via rent collections for over-priced houses for the poor. This gives the rich the money while blaming the poor for the taxes.
The solution has been suggested by several people:
If any single one of a company's employees is eligible for benefits, it should be illegal to payout dividends to shareholders, under the anti-slavery laws, as well as the rules if "illegal trading" which apply to drawing money from a company that is not profitable and driving it into bankruptcy (this may not be illegal in America, I don't know).
This should not require a change in the law, just for a few judges to clarify existing law.
It is worth pointing out that companies exist through a contract with the community at large and the community is in a position to dictate the terms under which companies can be incorporated. These should include a statement that the company is required to, as its highest priority, behave as a decent and honorable citizen. If it fails to do so, the CXOs are, by definition, responsible, and should be jointly and severally responsible for the consequences of each and every such failing, mroally and legally, including up to the death penalty where applicable.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday July 02 2018, @09:49AM (5 children)
Even if only with ISO9001**, there's still a chance to introduce inefficiency. E.g.
-"Say how you are going to demonstrate it was done" - any process measuring implies overhead. Any mediocre manager worth his salt wants purchasers and plots and... which means in time there's a good chance that more and more effort will be diverted from "do it" in "demonstrate you've done it"
- "Say what you are going to do" - and, after a while, you'll start to hear "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
--
** ISO9001 does not as far as CMM, 6-sigma, Deming wheel and other 'recipes' for process improvement.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @01:54PM (1 child)
ISO900x is a tool not a magic wand. You can do the wrong thing consistently and still pass it. And you can overdocument stuff, create too many procedures and still pass it.
The wisdom is knowing how much you need. And for most organizations it's definitely not zero.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:21AM
I'm far from saying ISO9001 is not good because it is not perfect.
I'm saying there are too little number of managers to use it correctly, because the temptation of using it in form only (as opposed to in substance) is sooo great.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Monday July 02 2018, @02:17PM (2 children)
As the customer of an ISO 9000 company, you can ask for the docs and read what is checked and how, and what was found.
You may not care, but if you do, you can ask, and then consider whether the measurement looks credible or not.
Without ISO9000, all you get is a salesman saying "It is just what you need, just what you want, looks good, and is real cheap - trust me - I'm a salesman".
I know which I would prefer if I was in big business.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday July 02 2018, @02:48PM (1 child)
Actually no, because ISO9000 implies a lot of pencil whipping.
I have some professional pride so in a non-ISO9000 workplace my name on a datasheet, for example, implies that to the best of my ability the datasheet is true and reflects reality.
At a ISO9000 workplace, where I've thankfully never had to work, some PHB will document that all data sheets will assert, say, automotive temp range suitability will be documented on all datasheets, therefore all datasheets for non-automotive temperature range parts will be falsified. Thats a kind of contrived example, but "we've found something that doesn't work, but we can't get the paperwork corrected so we'll keep doing it wrong" is fairly standard at ISO9000 facilities.
In the military we had a complicated process of generating documents proving that vehicles we were not using, were suitable for service, by a definition of service we also didn't use in our jobs, during a weekly PMCS (preventative maintenance something something) inspection. All it did was waste time producing a lot of paperwork having little reflection upon reality. We'd have been better off spending the pencil whipping time doing something productive. The mechanics were pretty good at making sure the vehicles we actually used, would work under real use conditions, because we didn't waste their time on the process designed to achieve that, which achieved nothing useful in practice.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Dr Spin on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:26AM
My original post did mention PHBs and MBAs. Unfortunately, I failed to mention Nepotism and unqualified morons in high places.
I once worked in a place where there was a rich kid wanted to be an engineering manager, so he (or his dad) bought 1/4 of the
company, and he was appointed engineering manager.
My job was to implement a command line user interface such that the commands had mnemonics that matched the random
ones the graphics designer used to illustrate the touch panel buttons, as the panel had gone into full production without
the software being written!
In another project at the same company, the managing director's wife coded 8048's to act as UARTS (cos the UARTS cost more
than mask programmed processors here in the UK). A huge quantity was ordered before they discovered she had sent the bits
in reverse order! These were quickly re-described as using a "proprietary encryption algorithm". She wrote very good assembler,
but in both cases, the underlying problem was that not only was there was no actual spec, management had no actual
understanding of what a spec was!
Both products worked well - the software I wrote was still in use 10 years later. The company was bought out by a well
known American competitor whose products had cute, cuddly names, but did not actually work. They needed something
that did.
Horse sense is mainly the province of horses - not many horses reach management pay grades.
and
No amount of paperwork can save you from idiots.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 02 2018, @06:47PM
If the communities aren't retarded, those terms will be reasonable. Otherwise, you'll only get the grotesquely unethical with an angle.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday July 02 2018, @05:26PM
Shouldn't we determine that quality is the problem before we blame their quality management system?
Also, how much of their stock price drop was caused by Trump's tariffs? They're supposed to get pretty hard by them, making investors nervous. [cnbc.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by deadstick on Monday July 02 2018, @01:30PM (1 child)
I used to work for a major aerospace corp that went the Six Sigma route, requiring all management and engineering personnel to attend workshops and get a pretty little certificate. It started off with half an hour of marveling at the statistical significance of the name (Only this many defective widgets in a shipment, yada yada), and then segued into a six step program that had nothing whatever to do with stats...basically Scientology for corporations.
The "final exam" was to form a focus group, apply Six Sigma to a process, and file a report...we quickly pencil-whipped that and put it down the Memory Hole with Zero Defects, Continuous Measurable Improvement and the rest of that crap. The department head got a promotion for achieving 100% "certification".
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday July 02 2018, @02:22PM
http://assets.amuniversal.com/2d9dac40554801363c91005056a9545d [amuniversal.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @02:30PM
To those two issues, I will add one more management practice that Jack Welsh and GE popularized. Top Grading. The practice of identifying the bottom 10% of your workforce and firing them every year. In theory this leads to a continuously improving workforce. In practice it creates a large number of micro incentives that drive managers to do things they just shouldn't do in a healthy company. Amazon jumped into Top Grading fully, and from personal experience, it was very hard as a manager to "do the right thing" and also comply with the forced Top Grading goals and procedures. And it made working with other managers who stopped caring about working together and only about their career and promoting their people to ensure they were always out of the bottom 10% (even if they were indeed down there based on skills and productivity).
Top Grading is a virus. And part of GE's issues are due to it, IMO.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 02 2018, @02:31PM
If a company strikes it rich because their mascot is a sock puppet, and if 99% of managers are followers, as they are, then you can expect 100 copy cats declaring the logical and rational path to success is having a sock puppet at a mascot, tons of industry press about the booming relevance of sock puppets in todays business climate, etc.
Its really not that complex or rational or logical, just monkey see monkey do. Just like having a shitty open office floorplan that doesn't work in practice, but we have to do it because other people are doing it. Or take your dog to work, or any number of other stupid ideas.
All that happened is "greater large economic forces" massively pushed financialization scams as a temporarily profitable business model, and somehow, God only knows how, some previously boring legacy heavy industry company rode the peak of the scam wave a generation or two ago so they were successful as long as financialization scams were successful. Therefore their mascot being a sock puppet, or some bizarre corporate propaganda about quality documentation, or whatever other statistical randomness a company can have, is proudly held up as signal, not the noise it is.
Another side dish is talking about WHY they were actually successful might be a very negative "bad think" "double plus ungood" topic, so we'll talk about their only reason for success being open office plan or a really cute sock puppet as a mascot, so as to not offend a very wealthy advertising purchaser. "You all were successful because you pivoted into financial scamming and out of real work, while keeping just barely more legal than the companies that blew it" is not going to win as many fans and love as "you have the most beautiful paperwork ever".
The irrational copy cat act could just as easily have been "all companies need walnut boardroom tables" or "all companies need a division that manufactures steam turbines". Follower behavior does not have to make sense, to be followed.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 02 2018, @02:37PM (1 child)
There's also an aspect of manly chest thumping going on with six sigma.
Someone who doesn't know whats going on MIGHT attribute success at my workplace to the really nice hotplate that keeps my breakfast tea hot but not boiling.
The reality is my workplace is successful enough that I can show off by wasting money on a really nice hot plate for my tea.
Confusing goals with effects. If you want a successful company where you can afford useless junk like a really nice hot plate for my tea pot, then work really friggin hard for a long time. If you're dumb, then if you want a successful company, you'll buy a really nice tea pot hot plate and wonder why the company didn't magically exceed expectations.
With a side dish of "look at me, I'm so frigging great we can waste 90% of our time on useless BS and still kick all you're all's butts". If you want to be as tough as the guy who wan whip someone's butt with one hand tied behind their back, training should be to train hard, not to tie your hand behind your back and then wonder why you're not winning fights. And that's six sigma in a nutshell, its an executive dick size contest to see who's got a department so incredible they can waste 90% of their labor and still kick everyone elses butt, as if the performance of that department has anything to do with today's short term seagull manager anyway.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @03:30PM
> you'll buy a really nice tea pot hot plate and wonder why the company didn't magically exceed expectations.
A sad/amusing example of this (depending on your point of view) occurred in NASCAR racing over the last 20-30 years. Traditionally, NASCAR teams were led by charismatic (and often very clever) Crew Chiefs. Not college educated, they came up through the ranks of Saturday night racing and have more in common with an old style tough-as-nails football coach than with an engineer. The really smart team members might use a little bit of high school algebra to calculate very simple things like spring rates (Hooke's law), but much of the behavior of the car was beyond comprehension.
Then the tobacco money started pouring in, the sport went from regional to national and the owners started looking for an edge. They went to Detroit and got snippets of engineering assistance. Often the first toehold was a few trips to a wind tunnel. An open minded team member might cotton up to an engineer with a question about something that they couldn't make sense of. Then the most forward looking team owners hired some experienced engineers to support all of the trial and error learning in their organizations.
Sometime in the mid-90s, the word started to get around, teams with a few engineers were starting to consistently out-perform everyone else. All of a sudden, every team had to have an engineer...and many inexperienced people were hired, often directly out of university. This failed miserably, the young engineers didn't have the background to slip into a team that ran on back-slapping and superstition [1] and start making sense of things, so they never got into the in-group that had influence on the race car.
It's now to the point that some of the Crew Chiefs are engineers and all the larger teams have engineers on staff (perhaps 50-100 people), so the transition is nearly complete. 30 years ago, if there was a change in the rules, it might take the better teams a year or two to evolve a new setup that worked with the change. Now, there is so much advanced math modeling available that the top teams adapt to a rule change almost immediately--large experiments are run in simulation to determine a good compromise. Not to say that it is a solved problem, quite often one of the top teams manages to lose their way and drop off the podium for a year or more.
[1] The differences between lap times and the margins of victory are often so small that actually quantifying what makes one car setting/adjustment better than another is a very hard problem. It is easy to fall into superstitious or religious thinking, as opposed to doing your own thinking, running your own experiments and reasoning from first principles.
(Score: 3, Funny) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday July 02 2018, @02:41PM
It's Jack Welch, not Welsh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch [wikipedia.org] He wrote a book [amazon.com], which I didn't think very much of personally.
Seems like the editorial team needs a Six Sigma program. :O
[And yes, I know TFA got it wrong in the second sentence. Which is indicative as one of the many things wrong with modern "journalism."]
This sig for rent.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @03:28PM (2 children)
Rowing from a Six Sigma Lean perspective [blogspot.com]
A Japanese company and an American company decided to have a canoe race on the Mississippi River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.
On the big day, the Japanese won by a mile. The Americans, very discouraged and depressed, decided to investigate the reason for the crushing defeat. A management team made up of senior management and internal Lost Race Analysts was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action. Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the American team had 8 people steering and 1 person rowing.
To validate their conclusions, the American management hired a consulting company and paid them a large amount of money for a second opinion. The consultant advised that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people were rowing.
Taking pride in quick action and to prevent another loss to the Japanese, the rowing team's management structure was totally reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 3 area steering superintendents and 1 assistant superintendent steering manager. The American HR team devised an innovative incentive that would give the 1 person rowing the boat greater rewards for working harder. It was called the "Six Sigma Lean - Pay for Rowing Performance - Total Quality Program", with meetings, dinners and free pens for the rower. There was discussion of getting new paddles, canoes and other equipment, extra vacation days for practices and bonuses.
The next year the Japanese won by two miles. Humiliated, the American management team laid off the rower for poor performance, halted development of a new canoe, sold the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. The money saved was distributed to the Senior Executives as bonuses and the next year's racing team was outsourced to India.
Thank goodness the 1st amendment forces people to listen to you and agree with you.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday July 03 2018, @09:25AM (1 child)
Modded funny but it's really too close to the truth to be laughed about...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 03 2018, @02:54PM
I read that story back in my Usenet days, very early 1990s. I remembered it. Googled it and found a link.
Thank goodness the 1st amendment forces people to listen to you and agree with you.