More On Gingrich and Lean Six Sigma -UPDATE

I noticed I received some search engine traffic because of a previous post on Newt Gingrich's endorsement of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) for the federal government. I loathe LSS, but I didn't explain why. LSS is a process improvement methodology already widely adopted by the Department of Defense. How could I be against process improvement? I'm not. I'm against a cumbersome bureaucratic approach to process improvement that actually prevents the outcome it purports to achieve. If you applied lean thinking to the LSS formal methodology, you would toss most of it overboard as non-value added, to use the vernacular.

My personal experience is that LSS events always fail to deliver results, but process improvement projects that have a specific goal usually succeed. Why is that? Because one of the Seven Habits is to start with the end in mind. LSS has no particular end in mind, because it is focused on process. But process is only a means to an end, so LSS is doomed to failure.

But of course, it lives on, like some zombie religion that you can't seem to kill off, no matter how many lives it wrecks. Its adherents display all of the personality traits of cult victims, hence KT's hilarious video in the previous post and my tweet that I thought that Newt was a Christian.


KT has a post where he quotes an anonymous industrial engineer at GE regarding LSS and process improvement.

It used to be that I (a trained industrial engineer), in the normal course of my day, would observe quality or process problems and take appropriate action to analyze and correct them. I could often do this very rapidly so that we would enjoy the benefits of the changes immediately. But with the introduction of Six Sigma, such a logical system is no longer possible.

With Six Sigma, if you don't run the gantlet of Six Sigma paperwork (charts, reviews, critiques, etc.) for every little thing, you're wasting your time. You see, now at GE, the litmus test for any employee is Six Sigma credit, a fact that I noticed while completing one of my first Six Sigma projects in order to earn my Green Belt certification.

Read the whole thing.

Exit question: Is Newt really serious about lean six sigma, or is it actually a devious plot to bring the entire federal government grinding to a halt?

UPDATE

In the comments, KT says:

I think Newt read about it or was told about it by some corporate consultant and he fell in love with it. Newt's got lots of great ideas, but since he never does anything, he can't tell which ones will work and which ones are just blather.

We don't need a conservative version of Obama in the White House. Gingrich may have been Speaker of the House, but that was a while ago, and he has never really had an executive leadership position.