Six Sigma Still Pays Off at Motorola

摘要

IT MAY SURPRISE THOSE WHO have come to know Motorola for its cool cell phones, but the company's more lasting contribution to the world is something decidedly more wonkish: the quality-improvement process called Six Sigma. In 1986 an engineer named Bill Smith, who has since died, sold then-Chief Executive Robert Galvin on a plan to strive for error-free products 99.9997 percent of the time. By Six Sigma's 20th anniversary, the exacting, metrics-driven process has become corporate gospel, infiltrating functions from human resources to marketing, and industries from manufacturing to financial services.