SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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 . . .
Alternative für Deutschland
(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.
Revolver, or semi automatic modified to be fully automatic -- which is best for senior citizens in their porch swings?
(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.