Is Your Six Sigma Culture Blinding You To Market Value Opportunities?

The other day I was speaking to a Master Black Belt from a large manufacturing concern who was talking about the success of their Six Sigma deployment. During a lull in the conversation I tried to get her to talk about how they are using Six Sigma to grow market share. After a brief moment of reflection she indicated that they haven’t focused SS on anything but cost cutting and said that this was their sole focus. Their culture was one of continuous improvement and that the organization rewarded successful efforts to cut costs.

The juxtaposition of Six Sigma and corporate culture got me to thinking about a study of quality managers I helped conduct with iSixSigma Magazine in 2008 (July/August). One of the questions we asked was “Which of the following is currently the single most important basis for defining the success of your company’s Six Sigma initiative? The two most frequently cited responses were “Changing company culture” (22%) and “Cutting costs (22%).

Now, the nature of corporate culture is that among other things it defines ways of doing things, activities that the organization values, what gets rewarded and what gets sanctioned, and beliefs about the goals of the organizations. And, while there is some disagreement as to what corporate culture actually is, there is strong agreement that it is a powerful force in shaping behavior. To the extent that an organization is successful in changing to or creating a Six Sigma culture that culture might typically embrace values, behaviors and reward systems focused on cost cutting or defect reduction. Here’s my point. Both of these outcomes, cost cutting and defect reduction, are internally focused and product oriented. Does a culturally driven Six Sigma inadvertently erect a cultural wall that impedes an organization from looking externally? Does it by focusing an organization’s attention on internal activities occlude market opportunities that might be visible to organizations that have a more market focus?

What we know about corporate culture is that it is relatively difficult to change. Once embedded within an organization it becomes a powerful system of rewarding and punishing behavior and directing the way people within the organization think. It creates the way they identify and solve problems. It creates the box in which people find it difficult to think out of. Changing culture meets with strong resistance. Once people learn the rules and understand what is good for them, changing the rules means relearning thinking patterns and behaviors.

It’s a small step from rewarding the reduction of defects to cutting costs. On the other hand, the step from cost cutting to growing market share is more a like a leap than a step. What mechanisms within Six Sigma will shift the organization’s focus from the manufacturing floor to the market place? How will this take place? How do you get a group of people to start thinking about competitors, targeted markets, customer value and market share when they have spent so much time thinking about products and costs? How long will this take? What impact will this have on your capacity to compete? In short, what is there within a Six Sigma culture that can shift the focus of an organization beyond the manufacturing floor?

Six Sigma Marketing offers a disciplined fact-based approach for growing market share in targeted product/markets by providing superior value. Equally important is that it provides a bridge from the internally focused Six Sigma with the goal of cost cutting to a Six Sigma that is dedicated to growing market share. SSM capitalizes on the rigorous problem solving approach that is embraced within a Six Sigma culture of continuous improvement to transition the organization to a market focused culture capable of identifying value opportunities and turning them into value laden products and services.

SSM is transformational in nature. It requires the learning of a new set of value tools to manage the organization’s competitive value proposition since value identification, creation and delivery cannot be done using the traditional tools of Six Sigma. At the same time, SSM retains the disciplined focus on continuous improvement empowering the organization to a dominant market performance.