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Comment by OldGuyInTheClub | Hacker News Reader

GE exported a lot of the Welch insanity. Anyone unfortunate enough to be forced into Six Sigma training will attest to the agony. This was through their own and licensed training orgs, their people who left to run other companies, and this guy, a sort-of Erdős-for-business that spread a lot of the frobozztik into other C-level offices. (No idea how much of it he came up with.)

https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007...

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I was at a heavy equipment company that was sold on 6 Sigma. It was so bad. So much quality theater. Teams were culled of their “high potential” employees, who were sent off to become black belts and lead random projects with fancy story boards and amazing $$$ saved charts. I think it honestly was what seeded my departure a few years later.

We had a Six Sigma "Program Office" that sent out pompous announcements whenever a Black Belt got his/her wings. They tried to make it sound like Top Gun. These elite and best-of-the-best would empower the project squadrons to victory over defects.

Somehow the projects didn't feel like diverting people and budget to makework tasks that fit the Six Sigma model as opposed to their reality. It eventually faded to be replaced by other codswallop.

As a serious statistics person, 6-sigma drove me nuts with it's own separate from reality probability tables, and their own separate terminology from the entire history of statistics, and their reasoning methods were simplistic and their role titles were immature nonsense: "black belt"?!?! It really felt to me like a massive fraud. But oh JACK WELCH endorsed it, he's a GAWD! Yeah, I smelt that shitty decay long ago, and I probably got somewhat of a bad reputation for bad mouthing 6-sigma during it's hay days. One of my in-laws was seriously into 6-sigma, had his "black belt", and is a bit of a giant dope, so that did not help...

Six Sigma is Feng Shui for MBA heads

Here's a great article by NBC journalist John Hockenberry on how Six Sigma was enforced by GE where it didn't make any sense:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120102065056/http://www.techno...

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