Six Sigma

Textron CEO on State of Six Sigma

By Ron Pereira Updated on January 22nd, 2008

USA Today recently interviewed Lewis Campbell, Textron’s CEO. The questions were mainly centered on Textron’s enterprise wide deployment of Six Sigma.

They asked several questions, some of them quite tough. All were answered with, let’s call it, conviction. Here is an example.

Q: Bain, a respected consulting company, tracks the 25 most popular business tools, such as benchmarking and customer relationship management. Of those, Six Sigma ranks 21st, near the bottom in popularity. Usage is low and satisfaction mediocre. If Six Sigma is so great, are other companies botching it?

A: Yes. That’s a bold statement for me to make. You must take the approach we’ve taken and do it right. We’re maybe 30 yards down a 100-yard football field. We’re going all the way.

I am not sure I like the football field analogy as this assumes that there is an ending point to the journey they are on. Perhaps it’s just a figure of speech and I am reading more into than I should.

Read the whole article.

Ron Pereira

Ron has more than 20 years of experience in various manufacturing, supply chain, and senior leadership roles. Ron has held the titles of process engineer, engineering manager, master black belt, and director of manufacturing & continuous improvement. In 2002 Ron was the first American to win the Nokia Global Six Sigma and Overall Quality award in Helsinki, Finland. Ron holds a bachelor's degree in automated manufacturing and an MBA in technology management.

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