Beyond Six Sigma: Profitable Growth through Customer Value Creation

Wiley, 2006. — 322 p. — ISBN: 0471681512, 9780471681519The ideas and concepts that comprise Beyond Six Sigma: Profitable Growth Through Customer Value Creation represent the culmination of a broad range of work by the authors with numerous companies across multiple industries. With more than a century of combined experience, we hope to share the rigorous process-based approach we have developed building and guiding growth initiatives through a focus on creating and exchanging value with customers. Detailed conceptual explanations and real-world examples present a clear description of how these ideas and practices have helped other companies and why you should consider adding them to your repertoire of tools to drive profitable growth.
Several factors drove us to put these ideas to paper. The first is the need for a process-based approach to manage growth that captures the best of industry learning from Six Sigma, but that is appropriately different. The Six Sigma process, developed by Motorola and perfected by GE, has been a powerful tool to drive cost out of an organization utilizing a structured and rigorous approach. Six Sigma success has been based upon its focus on data and fact-based management, a process improvement perspective, and a linkage between operations and financial success. Six Sigma has been used successfully to drive billions of dollars of cost from companies’ supply chains. To date, Six Sigma’s focus has been inside the four walls of a business—an inside-out
perspective—rather than a focus on how a company can create and exchange value with their customers—an outside-in perspective.
This inside-out perspective has served companies well through the recent economic malaise. During this period, many companies significantly reduced and, in some cases, eliminated growth-focused initiatives. Now that the economy has turned and presents the opportunity
for growth, companies must shift their focus toward pursuing profitable growth with the same rigor they have successfully displayed on the cost side, often utilizing Six Sigma programs. That brings us to the second factor influencing this book: The pressure is intensifying on companies to achieve growth rates that match or exceed overall economic growth.