Creativity Central Blog

Customer Focus Succumbs to Greed
by Charlie & Maria Girsch

Part One: The Cause

Our travels through corporate America reveal a growing tendency to abuse the venerable Total Quality Management philosophy and its second cousin Six Sigma. As in all human situations, a tool can be used for good OR evil. Sadly, for most practitioners, Six Sigma has been used to eliminate rather than enhance. The abusers have locked on to that part of the system where cost cutting is “the only right answer.”

Human nature, sometimes dressed as greed, misuses the initiative in search of greater profits and personal wealth. Enron, Andersen, the tobacco industry et al, while demonstrating amazing levels of creativity and innovation, have left us dispossessed. In truth, Six Sigma’s strength is in cost cutting and improved quality. As such, it’s ability to build the top line is dubious which renders it questionable as a sustainable business strategy. The sad result is that its the most common appreciation is as a cost-cutting utility.

Two recent brainstorming efforts have us guessing about the positives of Six Sigma. Both a midwestern manufacturing company and a Canadian food processor were looking for ways to differentiate their production from that of the competition. In each case, the organization’s product had been reduced to a commodity. Their product was simply no longer unique!

In a world where everyone does the same things, everyone begins to look alike. After all, if you have misapplied Quality and Six Sigma in order to down or right size, if you have delivered “just in time”, if you have “moved your cheese” and gone to “fish camp,” you suddenly realize that all of your competitors have done exactly the same things. When that happens, you’ve gone full circle. The only ways left to differentiate are by product or promotion.

More and more we at Creativity Central are called upon to help a company invent a promotional effort to entice and/or reward clients and customers for choosing their commodity. Innovation falls to customer compensation instead of product innovation. Dan Wallace of Idea Food puts it this way: “In the absence of innovation, organizations have no other options than to rely on Six Sigma etc. to increase quality and reduce headcount. The nature of free market competition will eliminate firms that don’t do this. The irony is that without innovation, Six Sigma and friends will only slow down the death of a firm.”

It’s worth remembering as we enter this reflection that the purpose of the Quality Movement, and its various offshoots, was to provide jobs and bring prosperity to the community. It is further worthy to note that Quality founder W. Edwards Deming believed that "there should be a relationship between the salary of the person at the top and the one on the bottom." That simple concept would be a hard sell in the majority of organizations where Six Sigma enjoys its greatest and most passionate practice.

Leader Source’s Bill McCarthy opines that we succumb “because we place such a high value on quantifying.” Peter Block suggests that "It is easiest to change those things that are easiest to talk about. So we focus on structure, roles, responsibilities. We have intense discussions about innovative pay systems, self management strategies, and the elements of total quality management. (However) if there is no transformation inside each of us, all the structural change in the world will have no impact on our institutions." We would suggest that true transformation can only take place when there is a transition from “same old thinking” to the search for “the next right answer.”

It’s easy to understand the misuse of Six Sigma if you look at two key factors that influence decision making in a growth economy . Here’s what we mean.

The first is the commitment to continued earnings growth and profit that is required by our investment economy. Jack’s Welch’s “Grow or Die” urging summarizes the first of these factors. Jobs and prosperity go out the door as they are replaced by a commitment to growth---an addiction, if you will, which is most easily satisfied by reducing cost to insure profit. This dedication has moved both manufacturing and jobs to places where the “costs” are considerably lower. In truth, the American dream is an economy of growth. And realistically we have come to believe that there are only two ways to grow: you either eliminate the costs of doing business or acquire market share through acquisition or merger.

The second factor influencing our choices is more subtle. Many of our managers fall into the categories of “sustainers” and “modifiers” according to the Creatrix™ Profile offered by The Richard Byrd Company. It seems that these categories eschew the creative risk-taking necessary to generate new product or to launch the initiatives required to successfully differentiate. Since the upside of increasing revenue is almost unlimited, one would expect that there would be a greater value place on promoting managers focused on improvement.

(There is a true story of a midwestern Product Marketing Organization that developed a unique climbing device which is sold in large quantities through a “big box” retailer. A manufacturing facility was set up off shore in order to achieve a very attractive retail price. The far eastern government where the plant is located stipulates that the midwest Marketing Organization (that developed and sells the devices) must sign a contract commitment to keep the laborers’ wages below a certain threshold in order to insure a balance in the off shore’s economy! “Mr. Midwest” complies in order to maintain his business: he likes the profits. As a consumer, you like the price. And finally, his organization enjoys its bottom line. Yet, as a citizen you start to worry about the loss of both the manufacturing AND the jobs. This constant tug between average everyday people wanting—no, expecting---low prices, yet spouting invectives concerning the outsourcing that’s going on in our country is clearly the dilemma that’s making Six Sigma “Sick!” )

This second more seductive factor finds comfort in the realization that Six Sigma (and Quality before it) grew up in a world of numbers. Both were born of the efforts of statisticians. Number analysis isn’t bad in and of itself. Applying numbers to the world of manufacturing has certainly produced an amazing improvement to the benefit of the customer/consumer. The Six Sigma improvement methodology called DMAIC stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. So far, so good.

For the first time since the beginning of the industrial age, manufacturers began to acquire data about their operations. The data was scoured to learn what wisdom it held or revealed about one’s systems and processes. Then, as problems and inefficiencies were discovered, the creative problem solving process was to be employed to create solutions. Look at the data; see what it tells you; change your perspective in order to let the unique aspects of the problem suggest new and viable solutions. That was the good news.

The bad news is that another group of statisticians, a.k.a. bean counters, found Six Sigma and began to MISapply its purpose and philosophy. Rather than use the power of innovation to improve, enhance, and reinvent, these practitioners chose the easy path of cost reduction in order to quickly arrive at a profit. Cost reduction became their “one right answer!” Thus you will hear stories like that of GE Capital, who after an enormously profitable year, announced a huge job reduction in order to reach even newer and better numbers in the next year.


Creativity and Innovation represent lateral not linear thinking---and that seems off-putting to some. So think of it this way. The Best Practices of lateral thinking can be formulaic in design. In other words, it is possible to open up one’s thinking in unusual and unexpected ways. Creativity Central’s no-fail Get Your Butt Fired™ technique, in a fun and productive process, invites out-of-the-ordinary thinking in order to grab outrageous possibilities that can be quickly reduced to practical solutions. We call it “going from the wacky to the workable,” and frankly, it never NOT works! There are literally hundreds of other formulas—and they are truly procedural formulas---which, when exercised by open engaged minds, can and do deliver innovation every time. The Creative Problem Solving method (CPS), which has been around innovation networks for years, is a process that works no matter the challenge. We have used it with clients to invent (or reinvent) everything from products to services to campaigns. It’s always a rewarding experience for our customers. We know this because we have always unabashedly offered a money-back guarantee, and all of our clients have felt they benefitted from the variety of Innovation techniques we shared with them.

Caveat Emptor. As you prepare to embrace the potential of creative, innovative thinking, be advised and carefully note that there is a penchant among the Six Sigma practitioners to embrace the highly systematized Russian Triz system. In a good and methodical way, Triz appeals to the statistical mentality. But like all things, good can be abused in order to produce innovation in a non-messy (read potentially non-innovative) manner. Continuously successful creativity is a lateral process. However, the very human desire (previously identified as greed when it’s pushed for cost reducing high returns) can now reappear seeking uniformity and comfort. Our humanness both embraces and abuses Triz’ “systems approach” in order to avoid the messy ambiguity of living without an answer in the moments it takes to discover the “next great right answer.”

There is hope. A handful of recent examples in our consumer society which demonstrate that product differentiation is possible without the long costly changes in systems that the “sustainers” and “modifiers” so dread. Dutch Boy paints and Round Up weed control have shown that simple yet dramatic innovations in packaging or delivery can differentiate their products in meaningful and profitable ways. Innovative product doesn’t always have to be rocket science!