Wisdom on the Green: Smarter Six Sigma Business Solutions Book

This book follows four successful friends who met in graduate school while pursuing their MBAs. Now they meet for a monthly golf outing to continue their friendship, discuss their careers, and compete in a friendly golf game for the price of dinner. The challenges they face in business and in their personal lives are all too familiar. Golf provides an intriguing metaphor for the game of life, with its complexities and challenges, changing conditions, chances for creativity, penalties, and rewards. Moreover, golf is the game most often associated with business. As Hank, Jorge, Wayne, and Zack share their experiences and pursuit of improvement in Wisdom on the Green, they discover powerful new insights that help them see how they can improve their games, both in business and in golf. This book will focus on the implementation of Six Sigma as a business strategy. Part of this strategy will include the integration of the Lean Enterprise philosophy with that of Six Sigma. We will also discuss ISO-9000:2000, Malcolm Baldrige Assessments, Total Quality Management (TQM), Balanced Scorecard, and Theory of Constraints (TOC). For implementation of Six Sigma, we will describe our strategy, which we call Smarter Six Sigma SolutionsSM, or S4 SM. This step-by-step roadmap has evolved over the years within the training and coaching sessions conducted by Smarter SolutionsSM, Inc. An initial roadmap for this methodology is described in Implementing Six Sigma1 and Managing Six Sigma2. The Smarter Six Sigma Solutions strategy calls the highest-level measurement a Satellite-LevelSM Metric, which is for tracking the high-level business measures to which Six Sigma projects are aligned. This approach also uses 30,000-Foot-LevelSM Metrics to track Key Process Output variables (KPOVs) of projects. These metrics are useful for establishing a baseline for Six Sigma projects, detecting when project change has occurred, and giving a high-level control measure that can monitor overall process change during and after a project is completed. To make improvements, focus is given within Six Sigma projects to identifying one or more Key Process Input Variables (KPIVs) that affect the KPOV variable. With the S4 approach, many KPIVs are referred to as 50-Foot-LevelSM Metrics, which are used to control the KPOV(s). The mathematical relationship Y=f(x) is sometimes used within Six Sigma training to represent the principle that in a system, outputs are a function of inputs. In Six Sigma terms: KPOV=f(KPIV). Some how-tos will be included within this book; however, we will reference other books, articles, and websites that give more in-depth descriptions of implementation. The glossary elaborates on both technical and golfing terms used within the book that may not be familiar to all readers.Read More