Bill Kappele, technical director and instructor at consulting company Objective DOE, does a great job of teaching individuals and organizations how to use experiments to reach a powerful level of improvement knowledge. He’s compiled a list of 10 statistical concepts that every engineer should know.

Bill’s list is excellent. In fact, I believe his 10 key concepts should be known by everyone tasked with making process or system improvements. But because Bill’s audience is primarily engineers, the language he’s used may be hard for some to get through. Here’s how I would tweak Bill’s list to extend it’s value to a larger audience: (more…)

Proportions pop up everywhere in life — “Four out of five dentists recommend…”, “Obama leads Clinton by ten percentage points among likely voters in Wisconsin…”, “Last month’s manufacturing yields are up from a year ago…”, and so on. Anytime you calculate the fraction, portion, or percentage something takes up from the whole, that’s a proportion. And Six Sigma provides a method for you to discover if one proportion is truly different from another. (more…)

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?