Developed in the 1950s by Japanese companies like Toyota under the tutelage of U.S. Quality guru W. Edwards Deming,  the practices now referred to as 6 Sigma were originally just a way of reducing waste and cost on the factory floor, while improving quality, delivery and services.
In the 1970s, U.S. manufacturers began adopting it in response to the threat posed by the Japanese. And it worked.

“Americans were getting hammered because we produced crappy quality, period,” Peters said. Thanks, in part, to 6 Sigma, “we did a pretty damned amazing job at coming back.”

Over the years, its process improvement techniques were adopted by plenty of nonmanufacturers, including Bank of America , Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, and Amazon.com.


Measurement is at the very heart of 6 Sigma.

Practitioners collect data, create matrices and charts and generate statistics to determine relationships.

“6 Sigma is a very alluring, scientifically coded way of saying, ‘Tomorrow, we have to build better products than we built yesterday,”‘ said James Schrager, a professor at the Booth Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago.

“Here’s the problem: The game isn’t just who builds the best products. Life is a battle against uncertainty.”

6 Sigma, with its focus on metrics and certainty, can lure companies into believing they have better visibility than they really do, Schrager and others argue. This leaves companies vulnerable to getting blindsided by events.

“It can be overdone,” Peters said. When it is, he said, the result is “big companies getting caught flat-footed.”

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