Overview

Over the past dozen years in working with both successful and failed continuous improvement initiatives, my colleagues and I have learned one hard-and-fast lesson: the Lean Six Sigma effort will succeed or fail based on the engagement and buy-in of the CEO and executives with P&L responsibility. If these people are engaged in the process, Lean Six Sigma will allow the whole organization to bring its enormous latent energy to bear on value creation. If they are not engaged, Lean Six Sigma will be just another failed effort in the company s history.

Evidence abounds in support of this proposition. In the past, a traditional approach to deployment would have been for the CEO to set corporate goals and let the P&L centers decide what is best, each going their own way.

Here s a real example of why that approach doesn t work. A highly decentralized manufacturing company decided to launch a program in which improvements were mandated by corporate, but the program was to be designed, and the cost borne, by the P&L centers. In a Darwinian world, one would expect that the managers would evolve to the best solution on their own. But evolution is an extremely slow process. Most of the managers had neither the time nor the knowledge to design a Lean Six Sigma program and were rightly focused on how to make that quarter s or that year s numbers. A manager at this company explained his lack of significant effort this way:

Corporate has set goals for...