Six Sigma SpotLight: David Silverstein, CEO,

Breakthrough Management Group

Six Sigma SpotLight is a regular feature of the e-Zsigma newsletter, and allows us to introduce one of the global six sigma community's superstars.

This month's Spotlight shines on David Silverstein, CEO of Breakthrough Management Group (BMG), www.BMGi.com.  Since founding BMG, David Silverstein has worked with many industry-leading companies as well as being a highly-sought after global conference speaker.

Mr. Silverstein has participated in every aspect of Six Sigma ranging from high-level executive mentoring to hands-on work with Six Sigma Black Belts and Champions. Throughout the Six Sigma industry, Mr. Silverstein is well known for his ability to lead companies through the implementation and deployment of global Six Sigma initiatives. Mr. Silverstein is a certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt and has earned a double degree in Mathematics and Physics from Ithaca College and an MBA from George Washington University.

Denver headquartered BMG Breakthrough Management Group (Denver, Colo. & Buffalo, N.Y.) is the world's leading innovator of Six Sigma products and services. It offers off-the-shelf as well as customized solutions products and services. BMG offers on-site training, public training, experienced facilitation and consulting, eLearning, as well as complementary web-based products. BMG has worked with clients across all industries including Standard Register, Mount Carmel Health, TAMKO Roofing Products, Seagate Technology, ABB, Borden, Fidelity Investments, Northrop Grumman, and Siemens.

We had a chance to ask David some questions about Six Sigma and the challenges facing organizations today that are pursuing transformational business system strategies…

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1. News: "Six Sigma is now facing lots of competition - Where is Six Sigma in terms of life cycle? Is it the same around the world as it is in North America?"

1. David: "I really see Six Sigma hitting an exponential growth-curve today...where most things are starting to hit a maturity point and starting to decline as new things are coming along, Six Sigma is just starting to hit exponential growth. I think the reason is that Six Sigma... represents the culmination of many things that came before it. Six Sigma has evolved beyond being just a methodology or toolset to what I would call a system... systems have feedback,... are adaptable, and so, Six Sigma many years from now may look very different than it does today, but I think it is still going to be called Six Sigma because the goal of achieving perfection is not going to change, the goal of being more disciplined and data driven... the new things companies are learning are being made a part of their Six Sigma implementation as opposed to launching into new things...

Clearly, in the manufacturing sector within the United States, there are hints of some level of maturity… There is no really good source of benchmarking data, but a (healthy) percentage of the Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 manufacturing companies are... starting to implement Six Sigma...

In the service industries, Six Sigma is still very young - a few years into Six Sigma in the financial services - but you can go into other services like healthcare, where we are seeing a lot of growth, and Six Sigma is very, very young. In that regard, I think there is still a lot of growth ahead of it…

There has been a lot of international Six Sigma from the standpoint of US-based companies with overseas operations, but companies local to these foreign countries are really just starting to look at Six Sigma. Six Sigma has probably gained a little bit more traction in Europe than in Asia... I think Six Sigma's still relatively early in its life-cycle."

2. News: "Six Sigma is facing a lot of internal competition, with other programs and other priorities fighting for the same focus and commitment within organizations. How do you respond to CEOs when they push back? How do you see SS fit in terms of all the other programs?"

2. David: "I think the key there is differentiating Six Sigma from all of those other initiatives, which can be better described as what we want to accomplish - for example, we want to become more e-Business focused. But, they rarely ever address the how. When Six Sigma is properly positioned as an enabler (for) the many other things that a company wants to do, then it starts to make sense that it fits in with all those other things - it should not be competing - it really exists on a different plane.

The implementation of other things that many companies have tried to do… can be better achieved with Six Sigma as an enabler.  How do we get the (Enterprise Resource Planning) implementation that was supposed to take six months, to take six months instead of two years?… Six Sigma can help us do that.

It is a dilemma at the early stages (of Six Sigma deployment) because there is obviously a resource commitment - financial and human - involved in making Six Sigma work. So, there may be a short-term conflict… Are we really ready to handle Six Sigma?…, and I think that is a healthy debate for a company to have, because if a company is not prepared to give total mind share to Six Sigma, then it may not be the time to implement Six Sigma. But, at the end of the day, Six Sigma should not be seen as something that is competing with all of the other initiatives - it should be positioned as the enabler."

3. News: "What are some of the key challenges in terms of Global deployment of Six Sigma from an organizational standpoint?"

3. David: "Well, there are several… One, is that the most experienced resources still reside in the United States, so there is the distance, the travel, and the language barriers. There are also the economic challenges, especially in Asia… they can't afford the kind of rates, in most cases, that Americans are going to demand. The other thing is that, once you go into these foreign countries, and get beyond the multi-national companies to the domestic companies, they tend to be companies of two to three hundred employees - a big company is a thousand employees - and the economics make it more challenging, so there is going to be a need for more localized training - more public courses at a local level, in the native languages…

And then there's also the challenge of companies just trying to play follow the leader - 'We want to do what they did in the US, we just want to do it cheaper', versus taking a step back and thinking about why they are doing it, and how they're going to do it... the biggest example is companies trying to follow General Electric… 

GE did some fantastic things for itself, but it is not a good model for other companies to follow. Before it went down the Six Sigma path in 1995, GE had spent ten years culture building - rebuilding the organizational structure, the culture, and the leadership. Companies need to figure out how to do (Six Sigma) in a way that is right for them, and that means a lot more thought in the beginning, a lot more planning, a lot more benchmarking, and a lot more deep consideration as to how Six Sigma fits into their business." 

4. News: "Is the establishment of mentoring programs for company executives a major success factor?"

4. David: "The management team in any Six Sigma implementation is the weak link. Everybody thinks that (Six Sigma) Black Belts have the toughest job, but as far as I'm concerned, they have the easiest job. We've changed their job descriptions, we've gotten them out of firefighting mode, we're investing heavily in their training, but, guess who the fire chiefs are? The managers and the executives in a business and the model of Six Sigma doesn't solve their problems - they still have all the same challenges they had yesterday plus we're now asking them to give more of their time and energy to overseeing the implementation of Six Sigma, selecting Black Belts, choosing the right projects, staying involved in what those Black Belts and Green Belts are doing… So, they have the biggest challenge, yet, they want to keep their training to the absolute minimum.

We've found that there's a great need for constant mentoring and coaching, and it's not just about Black Belts and Six Sigma projects - it's more fundamental than that. It's learning how to think in terms of probabilities and not certainties. It's understanding what is and is not a Six Sigma project, so that every time a problem comes up, a CEO or COO does not automatically say, 'Let's assign a Black Belt to that'… which happens all the time when those senior executives don't understand what a Six Sigma project is. It means really making a commitment to choosing the right kind people to be to be these Black Belts - it means understanding that, even in a very aggressive implementation, from the time you say go, to the time you train the management team, put in place some of the support systems… it is seven or eight months before you are starting to see measurable results.

So, if a senior executive team really doesn't understand what it takes to be successful in Six Sigma, then two or three months from now, we start to lose their focus… we need their focus for two or three years! We find a lot of one on one coaching goes a long way to making those executives really understand their role and effectively support the implementation."

5. News: "What are the biggest challenges in getting quick Return on Investment with Black belts? How do you build rapid internal traction?"

5. David: "First of all, every company is different, but everyone tends to use these grand averages and they create expectations for their companies based on those averages - it's just ridiculous. It would be like taking... two factories, that each... make 100 widgets per shift, each with the same process and same problems, but one (factory) works one shift and the other three shifts. It is still going to take the same amount of effort and resources to solve the problem, yet the plant with the three-shift operation will save three times as much money as the one that works one shift per day!  That's a three hundred percent difference, not a ten or twenty or fifty percent difference. So the first thing is understanding what the opportunity is for your company. I see opportunities that range from a four to one return to a twenty to one return on the initial investment in Six Sigma - that's a huge range, but what I tell my clients is, 'Who in their right mind is not going to accept a four to one return on investment?'.

Secondly, you have to have patience and understand... that you are looking at seven to eight months, even with a very aggressive Six Sigma implementation. 

The third challenge is keeping project durations down. I see too many companies letting projects creep up to six, seven, and eight months when they should be taking six, seven, and eight weeks. We need to drive down the project duration, drive up the project throughput… How do you build rapid internal traction (for Six Sigma)?… It's by increasing the throughput of projects, because traction - culture change comes from creating positive experiences for the people n the company, and the more projects you work on, the more people you are exposing to Six Sigma, and the more positive experiences you are creating, the faster you are going to get that traction.

(Lastly) is making sure you're choosing the right projects, and that goes back to the previous question - making sure the management team is properly involved, understands what a Six Sigma project is, understands the difference between business metrics and process metrics, and how to properly select projects, scope them, and set them up for success… These all go back to the management team - not the Black Belts."

6. News: "Is technology now playing a key role in SS deployment? What are some of the technology compelling events that business leaders should be aware of?"

6. David: "Absolutely!  We use technology in several different ways. One is just for tracking and managing projects - that's been around for a long time - but companies are finding they need good data to track and manage their projects, but they also need good data to drive improvement in the Six Sigma implementation. How do we drive up the throughput of projects and how do we drive down the cycle time?… We have to understand what the critical X's are that are causing our projects to run four, five, and six months. Is it the availability of historical data?… Is it the assignment of the right team members?… Is it the scope of the project that's too broad?… If we're not capturing the data on our projects, then we're not going to be able to improve our execution of Six Sigma.

But, even bigger than that is, as Six Sigma becomes more and more prevalent, (is that) companies are going to be looking for more cost-effective ways to implement Six Sigma and eLearning is going to become a more and more important facet of Six Sigma training and support for those who have already been trained in Six Sigma. A big part of the expense of Six Sigma implementations is the on-site coaching for Black Belts, ongoing support of internal Master Black Belts so virtual support systems can help to fill that gap.

Scroll up to right-hand side of page to continue interview...

David Silverstein, CEO, Breakthrough Management Group 
Images courtesy of BMG. Unauthorized use not permitted.

Click on image to go to BMG's website

Continued from left panel...

6. David...

The last way we use technology is to drive down the time it used to take to build support systems in human resources, finance, communications and (information technologies) - what used to take three or four months down to three or four weeks by using web-based tools and templates right out of the shoot and effectively building a Six Sigma company's intranet as a part of the process of developing all of those support functions. It's 2003… if companies aren't thinking about how to use technology as an enabler for Six Sigma, then guaranteed five years from now, they will look back and regret it."

7. News: "You have often spoken about "common practices not necessarily being best practices". Can you elaborate on this?"

7. David: "This goes back to a point I made earlier - a lot of companies following a leader. In other words, everybody does it, therefore it must be the right thing to do. When everybody else is doing things, they often get interpreted as best practices. There's a lot of websites out there - there's one called Best Practices, (www.bestpractices.org) - and there's nobody really looking at the data to say, 'This is a best practice'… they're looking at common practices and interpreting them as best practices.

(BMG) surveyed 27 companies, and asked them what the expected tenure of their Black Belts were. Was it one year, two years, three years, four years, indefinite - basically a career path, or unspecified - meaning they hadn't thought about it yet. What do you think 24 out of 27 companies said?… TWO YEARS!  (We then) asked those same companies the following question; 'If GE and Allied Signal had decided their Black Belts would be Black Belts for three years, what would the outcome of the survey be?'… THREE YEARS. So, what did they just say to us?… We all do it because GE and Allied Signal do it - not because there is any data that says it is a best practice. My anecdotal data suggests that it is not a best practice - that two years is barely long enough - (Black Belts) are just starting to get good at what they are doing at the 18 to 24 month point. Now, it made a lot of sense for GE… anybody on a management career path was put through two-year job rotations, so Six Sigma became part of that leadership development path, and it made sense that Six Sigma would be a two-year job rotation. It made sense for GE… GE thought about why they were doing it. Everybody else is doing it just because GE does.

For all of those people who published that in their books as a best practice, I'd like one of them to show me the data that says it is a best practice. Other common practices… Using an average number of dollars as a measure of projects. We go to great lengths to teach Black Belts and Green Belts about the difference between DPMO (Defects per Million Opportunities) and DPU (Defects per Unit). When we're comparing apples and oranges, we better use DPMO as DPU becomes a bad metric. Dollars per projects is analogous to DPU - it's a lousy metric. If you set a target of $175,000 per project, what are you going to do?… You're naturally going to expand the scope (of the project) until you can swallow $175,000 when, in fact, what I'd like you to be doing is narrowing the scope until we've isolated the process metric of interest.

What's happening out there is project timelines are going up - people are trying to get bigger and bigger projects. What's a good metric?… How about return on investment of the Black Belt's time? Would you rather have a project that was completed in a month for $100,000 (benefit) or is completed in three months and saves you $200,000? Clearly, the one-month project is a rate of return $1.2 million dollars per year rate of return on the investment of the Black Belt's time, whereas the three-month project is a rate of return of $800,000 per year. But, if your threshold is $175,000 or $250,000 (per project), you're going to prioritize that $300,000 project.

Most good metrics have a numerator and a denominator in it. In this case, the denominator should be time… dollars per unit time. That would be a better practice. (Based on this), a three-week project can have as much merit as a three-month project. When you go into some of the books, you find some things like, Michael George has in his book a decision tree as to whether something is a Lean-Six Sigma project. Can it be completed in three to five months? Well, we're Six Sigma people… what does that tell us?… That if it can be finished in less than three months, then it's not a Lean-Six Sigma project?…That's absurd! But, that's what he does with a statement like that… defines a two-sided specification… if it can be done in a three to five month window of time, then it's a good project - if not, then it's not a good project… That's absolutely absurd!

You can go into book, after book, after book, that sites that kind of metrics - and these are supposed to be Six Sigma experts!  There are countless examples of common practices that are getting translated into best practices. People need to take a step back and say, 'Why?', and demand to see the data!"

8. News: "In several articles, you spoke about the need to "Decondition six sigma beliefs". What do you mean by this?"

8. David: "Six Sigma beliefs means all the things that people believe to be true about Six Sigma that simply aren't. Six Sigma is very, very powerful - I believe in it - I see it doing tremendous things for companies but it's not the magic (wand) that companies are looking for… Here's a common belief - I see this happen all the time… You're the CEO of a company and you've been reading about Six Sigma… Who do the books tell you are the experts about Six Sigma? The Black Belts!  So, who are you going to hire to run a Six Sigma implementation for you?… A Black Belt!  Yet, you go hire a Black Belt that was trained at Allied Signal in 1998, and number one, they weren't there during the initial implementation of Six Sigma, so they have no experience with that. Number two, it wasn't there job to interface with the management team and drive Six Sigma, but people believe that Black Belts are the experts at leading Six Sigma implementations, but they're not. They're experts at working on Six Sigma projects…

There's a belief that Black Belts are experts after four months of training. That's absurd, too! A Black Belt after four months of training is like a doctor after four years of training - he's just starting his internship. Would you let a doctor who just graduated from medical school remove your appendix?.. Not a chance - they haven't had their internship yet,… their surgical residency. They can still be productive, but they need a lot of coaching, a lot of mentoring and handholding, they've got a lot of continued learning. A Black Belt that just finished four months of training and a Six Sigma project is just like an intern. They can be productive working on projects, but they are the farthest thing in the world from experts. There's a lot of myths out there and if people want good implementations, they need to start understanding these things better."

9. News: "We thank you for your time today, David. In closing, what is the last thing you would like to leave with our readers?"

9. David: "One of my biggest challenges in business is getting companies to really take a good, hard look at vendors they are going to select. It makes a lot of sense to use an outside firm to help you through the initial implementation of Six Sigma. It's something that can help you get there faster so you can still focus on your core business, but because Six Sigma has been such a high margin consulting business for a long time, there are a lot of big name consulting firms out there who have just had no incentive over the years to figure out how to do things better.

There's kind of a joke out there in the Six Sigma industry, if you want to call it an industry, that you see the same training material that was used at Motorola and Allied Signal - there has been no incentive to do things better. So companies today are getting into price shopping and are not really doing their homework to figure out who the very best firms are that they should work with. The only way for them to do that is not to ask a company for one or two or three references to talk to, they need to get out there with five or ten or fifteen of the customers that the firms they're going to work with have worked through. They don't just need to talk to the (Six Sigma) deployment leaders, who often don't really know what's going on. They need to say to that person, 'Hey, can I talk to three or four or five of your Black Belts and Master Black Belts about what's going on'.

We're at great risk of things going the same way as TQM (Total Quality Management) because every day, somebody else wants to hang a shingle out and say 'I'm an expert at leading companies through the implementation of Six Sigma', and the big companies that want help need to do a much, much better job of doing their due diligence in the selection of vendors - and they think they're doing due diligence when they're asking people to come in and do two hour presentations, and they check three references, and that's not adequate due diligence.

The second thing is that companies need to do a better job at the beginning of their implementation defining their long-term goals. Is it your goal to become a self-sufficient company in twelve months doing your own training. If it is, then it needs to be part of your plan on day one, and it's a little bit ironic to see these companies go through great pain to choose good trainers and then expect after four months that there are experts and that they're going to internalize training. They need to really start planning from day one, they need to identify who their trainers are, they need to be giving them experience right out of the shoot, they need to think a lot more about what they want Six Sigma to look like for them two or three years down the road.

(Finally), companies need to start changing (from) management commitment to management involvement… commitment is not enough - the management team needs to be very involved in a good implementation of Six Sigma in a very hands on way. But, if you do want to be out there on the cutting edge of business improvement, I think Six Sigma is the way to do it because it's going to continue to evolve, the way it has been evolving for the last fifteen years, for the next fifteen or twenty."

Rod Morgan, e-Zsigma, Inc. 

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