I’d like to thank my alma mater, BYU, for featuring my Six Sigma work in an article in the Winter 2008 edition of their alumni magazine. The article is titled, “Helping Companies Get It Right”. Go Cougars!

Can the principles of Six Sigma be profitably applied to any business effort?

A recent article posted on SportsIllustrated.com and printed in January 2008’s Soccer America magazine explains how Lew Wolff and his partners from the management of the Oakland A’s baseball team are using data, science, and objective decision making—what I consider the essence of Six Sigma—to successfully launch the new San Jose Earthquakes Major League Soccer franchise.

One of those on the ‘Quakes management team is Billy Beane, the originator and force behind the objective management methods that have led to success with the A’s. Mr. Beane’s ideas are outlined in the popular book Moneyball, where it shows how he uses statistics and y = f(x) + ε thinking to consistently achieve better results with less.

If that isn’t the essence of Six Sigma, I don’t know what is.

Michael Marx has published some great research in the latest edition of iSixSigma Magazine. It shows that soft skills (like verbal communication, team skills, leadership, etc.) are considered more important to success in Six Sigma than technical/analytical skills.

The news comes as no surprise to me. For many years I’ve cautioned managers and students that “soft” issues are the toughest part of almost all improvement efforts—much more often than technical issues. If you review your own experiences, you’ll likely find the same: when a project or effort has fallen short, was it due purely to a technical issue? Probably not. Instead, it usually was an organizational, interpersonal, or team issue that brought the project to its knees.

In my experience, those armed with only technical skills, even superior technical skills, don’t achieve nearly as much improvement as those who have developed good soft skills, even if their technical capabilites are below average.

My recommendation is to make soft skill training a foundation of your toolset. And resharpen your skills regularly. What’s the best way I’ve found: reading and rereading (and rereading again) Stephen Covey’s classic, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It is my favorite resource for improving my capabilities of successfully interacting with others.

What other soft skill resources have you found helpful?

How do you know if you know? In other words, how do you know when you have sufficient knowledge to reliably improve or manage a process? More than a century ago, Lord Kelvin suggested a simple touchstone to answer this crucial question: (more…)