Improvement Insights Blog
Six Sigma as Easy as Using a Microwave
Ever used a microwave? Easy, isn’t it? Six Sigma should work the same way. Here’s why:
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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals” and QI Macros [software].
“I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and if my mom wanted to reheat leftovers she had to turn on the oven, put the food in the in the oven and wait 15-20 minutes for it to come up to temperature. I don’t know about you, but I use a microwave; I use it almost every day.
“It turns out Raytheon discovered this idea of microwave cooking back in the 1950s and patented it, but they didn’t release an actual microwave till like 1967. It was 500 bucks, which in today’s dollars would be about five grand, so it was a big expense to try and buy one. Then, of course, prices came down and my mom eventually bought one.
“In Tucson, Arizona, it gets crazy hot in the summer, so it’s 107° outside. Nobody wants to turn on their oven, and so my mom became a master of cooking almost everything in the microwave in the summer. Winter, sure, I’ll turn it on, but most the rest of the time she used the microwave.
“Now I don’t know anything about the physics behind a microwave, but I use one every day. Unfortunately in Six Sigma, everybody thinks you need to know everything there is to know about all the formulas and all the calculations and all the distributions and all the other stuff that you can be able to do in Improvement. No! I don’t think you need to do that. You just need something like QI Macros to help you automate all that so you can get to results. I just want hot food, you know? I don’t want to know how the microwave works. Who cares? I just want answers. I want things. I want the end result.
“So if people are trying to teach you formulas and statistics and distributions and all that other kind of stuff… yeah, that might be important to learn sometime down the road if you really need to, but right now all you want is hot food, an improvement project, you want to save time, save money, save lives. That’s what it’s all about, not about all this other nonsense.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
