Six Sigma and other corporate delusions

[Alric]

I found a couple of people in the forums that have experienced six sigma firsthand.

It has many parallels to psychics. In my experience they used acronyms and scientisms in an effort to appear knowledgeable in a "field". I used to work for a contract research organization that was drowning in six sigma. They hire scientists to do the research and expected them to uncritically follow "process improvement" claims. It was also painful to watch an MBA explain for two hours the meaning of a distribution curve to statisticians.

Any other stories out there? Cheers!

[slyjoe]

I have first-hand experience with six sigma. It can be very useful for certain environments, not so much for pure R&D. The problem is there aren't enough data points or history to characterize the process(es) correctly.

[Alric]

It seems to me that it originated in manufacture where processes can be objectively measured. My understanding is that it came from Toyota where it was used to optimize car manufacturing using robots.

I think the problem is that in some cases management pretends to characterize the problem for the purpose of just making changes. All at the expense of workers time and intellectual integrity.

[slyjoe]

Actually, a lot was introduced by Motorola in 1986 for semiconductor manufacturing. I can't remember right off who initially wrote this stuff down, but one of the criticisms is that it wasn't anything new.

That said, some of the underlying processes are useful, even if you don't stick to the 3.4 ppm defect density implied by six sigma.

When I was involved (software development), the processes we used were measured and tracked. It did not seem to stifle innovation after the initial learning curve was mastered. In fact, one of our developers told me it was the first time he wasn't working in an ad hoc fashion over 50 hours a week.

[Alric]

That's interesting. Can you tell me a little more of how it was applied? Was it used for determining what code was better?

In my previous experience it was applied to the most trivial of things that had been solved in the field years ago.

[slyjoe]

We applied it for the software development process (all facets, not just code). Basically, the trick is figuring out what to measure and what tools you have in place to track your measurements. And then, the most important thing, is if you aren't going to use a metric to change what you are doing DON'T use the metric. A lot of organizations fail because they don't use it to improve business - they use the developers as lab rats.

For example, you can't measure your process if you don't HAVE a process. Write down how you do stuff - that is your process. Figure out what you can measure. Track it. Make changes and see what happens to your measurements. That's really all it is (at the 10000 foot level anyways).

[Alric]

But is that six sigma or common sense? It might depend on the caliber of the people doing the improvement but what I saw was very non-sensical, or the answer would be completely obvious but six sigma would just be used any way.

[slyjoe]

Well, it's six sigma in the sense you are measuring what your process is, seeing if your project is within its control limits (figuring out what those are is not trivial), and then adjusting the process to ensure your project is within the control limits.

It does depend on the people doing the improvement to some extent; certainly the people who are managing the improvement. One of the critical items we came across was that outside groups trying to implement process improvement were a failure. You have to get buy-in from the actual developers, and have THEM come up with measurements they can live with.

Very little of it is common sense, based on what I've seen of common sense. ;)

[bigred]

Six Sigma
Agile
Lean
TQM
Quality
BPR
BPI
FPI
CMM

etc etc, blah blah blah and ad nauseum :rolleyes:

Software-wise at least, I swear more money has been pissed away on the use/abuse of these concepts or "methodologies" than everything else combined....and the gov't is 10 times worse than any corporation with it (being experts at pissing away time and money, I guess that's hardly surprising).

[bigred]

Well, it's six sigma in the sense you are measuring what your process is, seeing if your project is within its control limits (figuring out what those are is not trivial), and then adjusting the process to ensure your project is within the control limits.Which you sure as hell don't need any doo-dad trendy methodology to tell you to already be doing.

run away, it is the rabbit.......this is giving me nightmarish flashbacks, noooooooo

[Alric]

Six Sigma
Agile
Lean
TQM
Quality
BPR
BPI
FPI
CMM

etc etc, blah blah blah and ad nauseum :rolleyes:

Software-wise at least, I swear more money has been pissed away on the use/abuse of these concepts or "methodologies" than everything else combined....and the gov't is 10 times worse than any corporation with it (being experts at pissing away time and money, I guess that's hardly surprising).

My experience as well. There might be a kernel of truth to these quality improvement methodologies but incompetence and lack of understanding of the true process it just ends up pissing off everyone trying to get some actual work done. At my former workplace they were decidedly thuggish about it.

[Foolmewunz]

Six Sigma can work in manufacturing as long as someone else has set the metrics and all you need to do is run the files to get the KPI and analyze them. The problem is in the setting of the bellwether for a "defect".

I'm in a service profession and we had to provide DPM (defects per million) reports and Six Sigma pareto charts for a huge account. Alas, our volume of containers and shipments was closer to 20,000 than 1.0 mio, so we wound up with any single shipment delayed by more than the allowable two days creating a defect. 1 late shipment out of 20,000 equals "50 DPM". Since the Six Sigma level of "acceptable defects" is 99.765%, we were off by a whopping error rate... 'cuz we naturally didn't have one such error, but more like 30 to 50 such "defects" per month.

Six Sigma, in brief cannot be used for service industries unless someone can define what a defect is. They counted a container that was late due to a typhoon as a "defect". The same container, booked by an operations clerk to Sydney, Nova Scotia instead of Sydney, Australia would also count as a single defect. One caused no problems whatsoever. The other caused a two month delay and 18,000 bucks in re-routing and replacement parts by airfreight. The KPI is the key. If the person who sets it hasn't qualified whether a defect really should be in the report, you're in trouble. In the sub-system I was forced to work with, there was no differentiation between the gravity of various defects.

We had the same problem, initially, with ISO. (Until we realized that no matter how crappy your processes were, all you needed to do was document them and you could get ISO certification for 97 countries within 8 months.)

My first meeting with their Six Sigma guy.... I'd never heard of the process back in '99.... Everyone was introducing themselves in a kickoff meeting... And the last guy (I swear he should've had garters on his sleeves) says, "And I'm John Doe, Six Sigma Black Belt." I thought it was a joke or that he was telling me about his hobby, and laughed out loud.

[Alric]

Ah! The belt thing is the funniest part. That should be the first indication things are not right with six sigma. At my former workplace some people started adding BB as an actual title.

[Foolmewunz]

Ah! The belt thing is the funniest part. That should be the first indication things are not right with six sigma. At my former workplace some people started adding BB as an actual title.

That's funny. Did they have a separate nerds table in the cafeteria?

[ARubberChickenWithAPulley]

I just left the military, where they were starting to implement six sigma in the civilian work force, and now work for a corporation, where I am likely going to get my six sigma "black belt" eventually.

First impression: Six sigma can be a useful tool, but like any tool, it cannot be applied 100% to any situation, and you still have to analyze whether it makes sense for your particular project or process. Like so many things that become almost faddish, people start advocating them zealously in ways that don't always work out or make sense.

And I'd just like to echo the stupidity of the whole "belt" thing. I have no desire to call myself a "black belt" or a "master black belt," and I'm not convinced I'll be able to do it with a straight face.

[Foolmewunz]

I just left the military, where they were starting to implement six sigma in the civilian work force, and now work for a corporation, where I am likely going to get my six sigma "black belt" eventually.

First impression: Six sigma can be a useful tool, but like any tool, it cannot be applied 100% to any situation, and you still have to analyze whether it makes sense for your particular project or process. Like so many things that become almost faddish, people start advocating them zealously in ways that don't always work out or make sense.

And I'd just like to echo the stupidity of the whole "belt" thing. I have no desire to call myself a "black belt" or a "master black belt," and I'm not convinced I'll be able to do it with a straight face.

You could introduce yourself as "XXXX YYYYY, 6 Sigma Black Belt, but from today I wish to be called Betty unless you can find the Chosen One".

[EvilBiker]

Well, I *am* a Black Belt, so let me throw my 0.02c in...

As an engineer, the statistical side of Six Sigma was nothing new to me, although some of the techniques used for data analysis were a bit more involved. I'd imagine that somebody with a thorough statistical knowledge would probably do just as well with applying the concepts.

I found that the main focus is on defining - as evinced by previous posters, the actual data collection and analysis is pretty easy, it's setting up the metrics that is the difficult part - what data do you need to collect, what type of data are you collecting, how much do you need to collect, etc. There is an obvious cost involved when trying to improve processes, Six Sigma proposes ways in which experiments can be performed with minimum impact in this area.

I'm a bit mystified by the whole "Belt" thing, but whatever - my company values the title, and it means exposure and advancement prospects, so I'm quite happy to use it. It also is useful as a conversation-starter at parties with impressionable women :D.

In the end, I found the course a useful refresher of things I'd forgotten about over the years.

[Alric]

Well. The problem is when companies start appreciating "black belt" over "PhD"...

Also look at Motorola. They are being kicked to nowhere by Apple in the handset market to the point they may quit altogether. Motorola is a Six Sigma originator, Apple is creative. I think this comparison is enlightening.

[supercorgi]

Software-wise at least, I swear more money has been pissed away on the use/abuse of these concepts or "methodologies" than everything else combined....and the gov't is 10 times worse than any corporation with it (being experts at pissing away time and money, I guess that's hardly surprising).

I've got to agree with that. My company went into Six Sigma in a big way. They wanted to apply it everywhere in the company (not just the manufacturing division where it at least made some sense). It certainly doesn't work in a chaotic, understaffed software development environment where they're willi-nilli pulling people from one project to another, constantly reorganizing, constantly having fire drills come up where they pull developers off projects, and meanwhile are trying to off-shore 40% of the work force without any pre-planning. I'm a software tech writer and we had to undergo Six Sigma training - How the hell do you implement this into a writing environment. Measure per service call that's based on documentation? A single service call could be really easy to fix, and other's would take days of work and the collaboration of many different people. In my opinion, Six Sigma is overhyped and applied in some areas that it's just not suited for. We had to undergo training where part of it was working with a team and a little catapult to get the most accurate shots. :rolleyes:

[supercorgi]

Duplicate post

[Alric]

We had to undergo training where part of it was working with a team and a little catapult to get the most accurate shots. :rolleyes:

OMFG! I forgot about the catapult. Would you believe that is their way to "illustrate" a normal distribution. Remember having to measure the catapult shots on a giant tin foil for a whole morning? The scariest part was that the trainers clearly did not understand what a normal distribution was! They just knew how to go through the motions and get the training certificate signed.

[bigred]

Well OTOH at least that sounds a little colorful, albeit in a silly way....try studying for a PMP sometime. You'll never have insomnia again.

[badnewsBH]

Six Sigma, in brief cannot be used for service industries unless someone can define what a defect is. They counted a container that was late due to a typhoon as a "defect". The same container, booked by an operations clerk to Sydney, Nova Scotia instead of Sydney, Australia would also count as a single defect.

Oddly enough, a co-worker experienced this when trying to attend a course, only in reverse. Sydney, NS is only a few hours' drive from us. Sydney, New South (Wales), however...

Great booking system, that. :rolleyes:

We had the same problem, initially, with ISO. (Until we realized that no matter how crappy your processes were, all you needed to do was document them and you could get ISO certification for 97 countries within 8 months.)

My favourite analogy is one I read on the Web some time ago, for the "Capability Maturity Model". It basically said that quality of the process or the finished product was irrelevant; you could be making concrete life preservers, but if you documented everything correctly, welcome to level 5. :p

I agree wholeheartedly about this Six Sigma stuff. Our company's been trying to make use of it, but really, unless it's in the manufacturing side, I don't see how it can work. The process always seems to refer to finding defects, and correcting them by tightening a bolt somewhere. I wish I could avoid making mistakes that easily.

[bigred]

...and yet people make millions on this BS and are laughing all the way to the bank.

You really want to make your company a lot more profit? Come up with some BS "improvement methodology" and sell it to all these managers trying to make a name for themselves by getting THEIR companies to buy into it with "workshops" (ad nauseum).

PS my sympathy to military contractors; they're some of the very worst at playing this pointless game.

[ARubberChickenWithAPulley]

Well OTOH at least that sounds a little colorful, albeit in a silly way....try studying for a PMP sometime. You'll never have insomnia again.

I've gotta do that shortly, although I am lucky in that my boss places very little value in those certifications other than he needs them because his boss says we do. He'd rather see us do the job than have a piece of paper saying we can do the job.

And while the PMP is bad, they apparently just instituted a new Program Manager Certification, and it blows the PMP out of the water in sheer tediousness.

[Darth Rotor]

Six Sigma, if one goes to the root of the curve and the use of sigma, is as close to a demand for zero defects as anyone has dared come -- yet.

While some of the tools of process control and process mapping are common to a lot of the various buzzword heavy process improvement methods already mentioned in this thread, I had a violent objection to Six Sigma, as a label and as a snow job, when I first encountered it, having just been up to me arse in a Deming transformation project.

When half the people blabbering six sigma buzzwords without the slightest clue of what sigma ever was in a practical sense, in terms of cost benefit, safety factors, points of diminishing returns, ad nauseum that I learned in undergrad mechanical engineering design classes, it got relegated to

Buzz Word Heavy New Freaking Time Sink du jour.

What's next, I wonder, after we waste more money on Lean?

DR

[alfaniner]

I was always tempted to call it "Sick Smegma" but never did for fear of getting fired.

And every time someone introduces themselves as a Six Sigma black belt I want to say, "You're not a Black Belt. I'm a goddamn Black Belt." (25+ years in the martial arts). But humility prevents me from doing so. :) And again, there's that whole getting fired thing...

[Alric]

And here is an example of Six Sigma results:

Motorola officially considering dropping its phone unit (http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/31/motorola-officially-considering-dropping-its-phone-unit/)

Now. Can anyone propose a way to write a paper about this to demonstrate logically that six sigma does not work in non-manufacturing environments. I believe its just a matter of significant figures. The measurements Six Sigma uses to arrive at conclusions do not have enough significance.

I am afraid we need someone like Malcolm Gladwell to finally put their foot down.

[bigred]

it blows the PMP out of the water in sheer tediousness.Not possible.


What's next, I wonder, after we waste more money on Lean?
Why the next trendy "process methodology" of course...



And every time someone introduces themselves as a Six Sigma black belt I want to say, "You're not a Black Belt. I'm a goddamn Black Belt." This would be perfect if after saying this you roundhouse kicked em to bring the point home. :cool:

[Jason Smith]

...and yet people make millions on this BS and are laughing all the way to the bank.

You really want to make your company a lot more profit? Come up with some BS "improvement methodology" and sell it to all these managers trying to make a name for themselves by getting THEIR companies to buy into it with "workshops" (ad nauseum).

PS my sympathy to military contractors; they're some of the very worst at playing this pointless game.

Hear, hear!

My company (medical devices, where quality control is a very big deal) was flirting with the idea of six sigma last year. One of the biggest proponents was an utterly useless project manager who got her green belt, and then tried to lecture our biostatisticians, men and women with masters' degrees in statistics, as to all their statistical errors. Luckily, that idea was dropped due to budget constraints. As a previous poster commented, there's probably a degree of value in six sigma, but it seems to attract mid-level managers (or worse, mid-level manager wannabees) interested in impressing others with their alleged expertise.

Of course, if you're lazy you don't have to bother with all the seminars. Just write a book where you bloviate about a simple business truism, like "try to make your customers happy" endlessly, and watch the $$$ roll in from managers trying to catch the next big wave of excellence ...

[BenBurch]

Six Sigma and its evil spawn the SEI Software Process Certification utterly destroyed the Wireless Data Group in Motorola in the mid 90s.

It was the most innovative group you could imagine and had cutting edge products developed and developing. YEARS ahead of its time, and then one June, they issued the edict that the group would have to meet the most stringent levels of SEI Certification by December!

And you know what, creativity was gone and it was no longer fun to work there, and it all fell apart.

Never did reach the certification goal, either.

I moved on to Zenith, which is another story entirely.

-Ben

[Kestrel]

We had the same problem, initially, with ISO. (Until we realized that no matter how crappy your processes were, all you needed to do was document them and you could get ISO certification for 97 countries within 8 months.)

All you really need for ISO certification are a small set of simple processes that are actually followed. My software group was audited and passed with flying colors. A code control system, a bug database, a spec for our product and a few short documents explaining how they were used were all it took. Everything was on web pages so we didn't need to keep track of paper documents and keep them updated.

You don't have to create a big honking binder full of complex and obtuse documents for ISO certification, but for some reason that is what most companies end up doing.

[Kestrel]

...and yet people make millions on this BS and are laughing all the way to the bank.

You really want to make your company a lot more profit? Come up with some BS "improvement methodology" and sell it to all these managers trying to make a name for themselves by getting THEIR companies to buy into it with "workshops" (ad nauseum).

PS my sympathy to military contractors; they're some of the very worst at playing this pointless game.

The recipe for creating a new quality process is rather simple.

1. Gather a set of engineering practices and techniques.
2. Sell it as a religion.

[EvilBiker]

The recipe for creating a new quality process is rather simple.

1. Gather a set of engineering practices and techniques.
2. Sell it as a religion.


2a. ...with a catchy title.
3. Denigrate the original practices and techniques gathered as "old school".

[Father Dagon]

I suspect that they first invented the catchy name, then filled out the blanks.

And the parallells to physics... Gimme a frakken break, will you? Organizations is organizations. You can't even compare organizations with newtonian pre-atom model physics.

I'll say that the various elemental models (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Elements) has more to teach the budding manager, as it has some psychological elements. But if you're going for gold, go for the classics. Sun Tzu and Machiavelli never gets old.

P.S. When I'm in a masochistic mood, I browse the "management" section at the book stores. I never cease to be amazed of the petty creativity when they raep the classics with their "clever" reinterpretations that is so in that they have a shorter shelf-life than minced meat. E.g. this reinterpretation of Machiavelli where IT-companies was discussed among other things (I guess that most of the book was written before the crash of '00.) The smartypants layout is usually a couple of notches below the pain of hydrochloric acid for eyedrops. Or why not the new book with the "new" perspective: Viking management (or what its name.) "The vikings drank blood from their enemies skulls. Now they invent pretty computer stuff." (Freely remembered.) I am sick and tired of the vikings. Foreigners that sucks up to viking schmaltz should be buried alive with Abba in the headphones. It's as if the Swedish Empire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Empire) never was.

[RobRoy]

Six Sigma and its evil spawn the SEI Software Process Certification utterly destroyed the Wireless Data Group in Motorola in the mid 90s.

Yeah, but Six Sigma, SEI/ISO certs, and other processes aren't innovation tools, they're quality tools. They look at a current process and try to trim the fat, and streamline it. Like any tool, when properly used, it works quite nicely (Motorola claimed $17 billion in savings in 2006 (http://www.motorola.com/content.jsp?globalObjectId=3071-5801)). But they don't make up for poor marketing, poor business decisions, lack of initiative, or overcome a competitor does these things better, or has a better product.

I don't see how Six Sigma, or any other quality process, can be applied to an area like R&D, which are all about hit and miss concepts.

[jimbob]

I had wondered what was wrong with Six Sigma (except for the belt "thingy", which did set off alarm bells). But then I work in an industry where parametric yields do tend to work, and had foolishly thought that people were simply applying it to manufacturing process improvement.

I didn't notice anyone mention 3M before (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406.htm).
Buckley [3M CEO] has loosened the reins a bit by removing 3M research scientists' obligation to hew to Six Sigma objectives. There was perhaps a one-size-fits-all approach to the application of Six Sigma as the initial implementation got under way, says Dr. Larry Wendling, a vice-president who directs the "R" in 3M's R&D operation. "Since [McNerney] was driving it to the organization, you know, there were metrics established across the organization and quite frankly, some of them did not make as much sense for the lab as they did other parts of the organization," Wendling says. What sort of metrics? Keeping track of how many black-belt and green-belt projects were completed, for one.

Or this from design news, where I found this story (http://www.designnews.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6500647&industryid=43656): (You might be able to skip the annoying flash ad)
3M Shelves Six Sigma in R&D
3M is largely abandoning Six Sigma in research and development
John Dodge, Editor-in-Chief -- Design News, December 10, 2007

<snip>
For the past two years, 3M Corp. has been giving back freedom and decision-making to its researchers following four years of Six Sigma mania under former CEO and Chairman W. James McNerney Jr. Six Sigma is a data-driven methodology and associated toolset for eliminating process defects. Its design component is known as Design for Six Sigma.


“We got a little tool happy (under McNerney),” says 3M Research Chief Larry Wendling, staff vice president, 3M Corp. Research Labs.

[RobRoy]

IOr this from design news, where I found this story (http://www.designnews.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6500647&industryid=43656): (You might be able to skip the annoying flash ad)

Exactly, Six Sigma and similar quality improvement tools don't work well in R&D. They work great after R&D is done with their stuff, when the manufacturing and delivery takes over.

[BenBurch]

Exactly, Six Sigma and similar quality improvement tools don't work well in R&D. They work great after R&D is done with their stuff, when the manufacturing and delivery takes over.

And R&D what just where I was in Motorola. Killed the whole effort.

[JoeEllison]

But is that six sigma or common sense?

In my experience, you have to "sell" common sense to management retards, using as many bells and whistles as possible. Most times, if someone within the company tries to implement a common sense change, it gets shot down for any of a dozen reasons. If someone comes in and charges the company $200 a hour to look at the same situation, and creates a PowerPoint presentation showing the exact same change, executives assume it must make sense to implement it.

[RobRoy]

And R&D what just where I was in Motorola. Killed the whole effort.

It wasn't Six Sigma that killed the R&D. Six Sigma worked just fine. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was the management choice to mis-use the tool. If I'm an archeologist, I don't use a bull-dozer to find trilobyte fossils and expect them to be in pristime, museum quality. On the other hand, if I'm building a 12-lane highway system, I don't use a hand-trowel to level and grade the land. You don't fault the bulldozer or the hand-trowel for doing what they were designed to do. You fault poor management choices for placing them in inappropriate situations.

In my experience, you have to "sell" common sense to management retards, using as many bells and whistles as possible. Most times, if someone within the company tries to implement a common sense change, it gets shot down for any of a dozen reasons.

Agreed. I think this is where Six Sigma, and other internal quality process tools, are useful. The provide non-scientific employees with a semi-scientific means to define, measure, and analyze data.

[Father Dagon]

In my experience, you have to "sell" common sense to management retards, using as many bells and whistles as possible. Most times, if someone within the company tries to implement a common sense change, it gets shot down for any of a dozen reasons. If someone comes in and charges the company $200 a hour to look at the same situation, and creates a PowerPoint presentation showing the exact same change, executives assume it must make sense to implement it.But couldn't the bells and whistles backfire? The worst people are not the uneducated, but the half-educated. And if the egos of the half-educated gets inflated, catastrophe is inevitable.

[Alric]

But couldn't the bells and whistles backfire? The worst people are not the uneducated, but the half-educated. And if the egos of the half-educated gets inflated, catastrophe is inevitable.

My first hand experience as well. Like I said before the biggest warning sign is seeing the suffix "BB" in a list along the MDs and Phds...

[Furcifer]

I found a couple of people in the forums that have experienced six sigma firsthand.

It has many parallels to psychics. In my experience they used acronyms and scientisms in an effort to appear knowledgeable in a "field". I used to work for a contract research organization that was drowning in six sigma. They hire scientists to do the research and expected them to uncritically follow "process improvement" claims. It was also painful to watch an MBA explain for two hours the meaning of a distribution curve to statisticians.

Any other stories out there? Cheers!

lol, I'm glad to see someone else that shares similar views on this particular subject. I 've a B.Sc. in Physics and have worked for DCX and other Tier1 suppliers in the automotive industry, and your smack on.

"Let the acronyms fly, no one will know what your talking about, and you look so smart do it"- This should be the Quality Management motto. APQP, PPAP, JIT, 5S's(SQDCM?). 6 Sigma, FEMA, SPCA, ISO, TS16946, QS9000, CS2... My favourite was the 5S's- Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost and Morale. "I see 1 "S" where's the other 4?" After about 2 months someone informed me that it's taken from some Japanese management system where there are actually 5S's to focus on. Acronyms are so important, ignore the fact that they don't obey translation very well. No one really knows what they stand for anyways, say them with conviction and everyone will nod appreciatively at meetings. If anyone questions an acronym, they're probably not a team player.

"I have a Black Belt in 6Sigma"- Oooo, his hands are registered at ISO as lethal weapons against waste. He could take on a gang of Non-Productivity Ninja's! In order to get your Black Belt you have to break a stack of SPC charts in two with your bare hands. Give yourself quirky titles like "Safety Sheriff" or "Waste Warden" you'll seem important while doing nothing more than anyone else is. Call a weekly meeting to discuss how things are about the same as they have been forever. Move the bar around so that you can discuss percentage improvements. If you have time, and you won't if your actually doing your job, create a bar graph or pie chart with as many colours as you can. Pie charts in particular look like pinwheels and are hypnotic. Plus pie charts are irrefutable evidence you are doing something, pie charts don't lie.

"Make the jump from middle management to upper middle management, Butt Kiss, Butt Kiss, Butt Kiss"- Quality Management Systems are inherently complex, no one knows for sure what anyone else is doing. Your boss is afraid that someone will find out he has no clue what he's doing. Reassure him on a constant basis that things are working even better than before! This will instill a false sense of accomplishment while removing any doubts. A week or so after he returns from yet another Leadership Training seminar, tell him there is a noticeable improvement since he came back. This isn't lying, cuz while he was gone you actually concentrated on your work and got some stuff done without him calling meetings or barking at you about something he has no clue about.

"Quality is job 1!,er 2?, maybe 3?" Despite the constant insistence that quality is of the highest importance, delivery is number 1! Remember this and you will go far. Banks don't loan money on forecasts of how many perfect vehicles or satisfied customers, they make loans based on the number of units you project to produce. You don't even have to sell them! Get them out the door and into a field where they sit and wait to be repaired, it doesn't matter! Although this goes against any QMS (Quality Management System) out there, we all know what really matters. Never discuss this in the open, someone might hear you. Substitute Quality for Quantity, it's easy! Just remember, when JD Power and Ass or the corporate auditors come a knocking, it's back to the QMS! But don't fret, these audits are known well in advance and preparations are always made. "Surprise audits" are akin to "Military Intelligence".

Just SPC UR QMS and STFU, U'L B OK!


;)

[Father Dagon]

My first hand experience as well.I am lucky enough to have very limited experiences in that field.Like I said before the biggest warning sign is seeing the suffix "BB" in a list along the MDs and Phds...BB?

[Alric]

BB?

Black Belt

[Psiload]

I used to work for GE Medical Systems... now GE Healthcare. Back around 2002 or so, the Six Sigma thing reared it's ugly head and our management team fairly fell over each other to guzzle the Kool-Aid. Everyone was so busy scrambling around doing "Six Sigma projects" and trying to "get their belts" that basically nothing along the lines of real work was actually getting done. It was a disaster. Within two years our division went from a cohesive, productive, happy team to a living, breathing Dilbert comic.

In all, the Six Sigma saga lasted for about three years, and eventually it just slowly died out with a whimper rather than a bang. It just fizzled out... "projects" weren't being approved, "Six Sigma" was no longer a valid justification for overtime hours (the big nail in the coffin), and all the managers one-by-one dropped the "green belts" and "black belts" after their names in their e-mail signatures.

It was fun to watch, and feeding at the Six Sigma overtime trough had been nice, but from a business standpoint, Six Sigma was nothing more than productivity Kryptonite.

[Alric]

That post is the best! I used to work for Covance Labs where we got all the GE dropouts. I'd say they are at the breathing Dilbert comic stage. What's bad is that some people that call themselves scientists have fallen for it.

[JoeEllison]

"Let the acronyms fly, no one will know what your talking about, and you look so smart do it"- This should be the Quality Management motto. APQP, PPAP, JIT, 5S's(SQDCM?). 6 Sigma, FEMA, SPCA, ISO, TS16946, QS9000, CS2... My favourite was the 5S's- Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost and Morale. "I see 1 "S" where's the other 4?" After about 2 months someone informed me that it's taken from some Japanese management system where there are actually 5S's to focus on. Acronyms are so important, ignore the fact that they don't obey translation very well. No one really knows what they stand for anyways, say them with conviction and everyone will nod appreciatively at meetings. If anyone questions an acronym, they're probably not a team player.
I worked a job where we decided that every "S" in 5S stood for "Steve," who was the go-to guy for damn near everything. So, 5S was:
"Steve, can you stay late and come in early this week?"
"Steve, can you fix this?"
"Steve, can you cover for so-and-so who didn't show up or call in?"
"Steve, can you train her on how to do this?"
"Steve, can you come in on Saturday and build this, so we don't have to buy a real one?"

Steve, as you can imagine, was only marginally amused. :cool:

[gambling_cruiser]

Six Sigma is old stuff!
But now we present Lean Six Sigma!!!!
We are a small company (less than 40 employes) and we avoided Lean Six Sigma only by being lucky. Would have been funny - the implementation would nearly all take to some type of belt or master belt and nobody would do anything else.

[Furcifer]

I worked a job where we decided that every "S" in 5S stood for "Steve," who was the go-to guy for damn near everything. So, 5S was:
"Steve, can you stay late and come in early this week?"
"Steve, can you fix this?"
"Steve, can you cover for so-and-so who didn't show up or call in?"
"Steve, can you train her on how to do this?"
"Steve, can you come in on Saturday and build this, so we don't have to buy a real one?"

Steve, as you can imagine, was only marginally amused. :cool:

Poor Steve, it must have been a tough decision for him; change his name or quit. :D

The worst experience I had with the 5S system was with my "Morale". I had slowly gone from green to yellow to red. I was issued a CAR (Corrective Action Request) by someone, who, try to full fill his 5S requirements, saw my board in passing. I ignored it at first, but my area manager got notified by email that I had an outstanding CAR, so he got a CAR from his boss. So they were all on me to fix my "Morale" issue.

The problem? This was two months before the scheduled plant closure. Most of my line was losing their jobs, some were unsure and depending heavily on buyouts to keep theirs and the rest were all worried about where they were they were going to, and what shift they were going to be on (my plant was steady days, the other plant they were being shipped to was running 3 shifts)

It was a head scratcher for sure. Luckily, the problem was easily solved for me by my boss. On a Friday morning, an employee asked me put them in the book for the following Monday off. When I tried to do so, I couldn't log into the system. I resolved to get it done after lunch for the person. Just before lunch i got called into the Area Manager's office. I thought it had something to do with my computer access problem. They sat me down and said "Unfortunately, due to the upcoming plant closure, we've decided to not renew your contract. You will be paid for the remainder of the day, you have 30 minutes to clean out your desk and leave the property, turn over your radio and keys, security will escort you out" No word of a lie, it just so happened that it was my birthday as well :(

I'm not sure if it was the plant closure, or me letting my 5S's slide, but to this day I hate any and all of these QMS or BMS.

[Jason Smith]

What an excellent post, 3body problem. I do have one minor suggested improvement. In this section:

[QUOTE=3bodyproblem;3414870If you have time, and you won't if your actually doing your job, create a bar graph or pie chart with as many colours as you can. Pie charts in particular look like pinwheels and are hypnotic. Plus pie charts are irrefutable evidence you are doing something, pie charts don't lie.
;)[/QUOTE]

You forgot to stress the importance of all your charts being 3-dimensional. What's the point of having a computer and Power Point, if you can't make your pies/rectangles 3-dimensional? Never, ever, forget the importance of color. The more colors in your charts/graphs/slides the better!

Seriously, my company is shifting over to the idea that every status presentation has to be color-coded. Projects are now either red, yellow, or green. Of course, there are projects that fall into the "orange" category: their status is truly screwed, but we don't want to let the managers see a red color, so we'll just tell them it's at risk (yellow).

When I say senior management is composed of the banal, foolish, and insipid, I am "not a team player." When other people treat senior management as if they are too stupid to understand things that aren't color-coded based on the traffic light model, they're just being good "team players." WTF?!

Note to all college students about to enter the corporate workplace: Dilbert isn't a cartoon; it's a three-panel documentary.

/Rant

[Alric]

I'm not sure if it was the plant closure, or me letting my 5S's slide, but to this day I hate any and all of these QMS or BMS.

Same thing happened to me! I think they know they can be called on their BS anytime and are really proactive on curtailing dissent.

In my case there there was scientific staff involved in creating an "issue". Fortunately my field is small and everyone knows each other. Needless to say I just switched jobs basically overnight and their reputation is now somewhat in question by other members in the field.

Now if a moderator could fix my misspelling of "delusion" in the title...

[jimbob]

What an excellent post, 3body problem. I do have one minor suggested improvement. In this section:

If you have time, and you won't if your actually doing your job, create a bar graph or pie chart with as many colours as you can. Pie charts in particular look like pinwheels and are hypnotic. Plus pie charts are irrefutable evidence you are doing something, pie charts don't lie.


You forgot to stress the importance of all your charts being 3-dimensional. What's the point of having a computer and Power Point, if you can't make your pies/rectangles 3-dimensional? Never, ever, forget the importance of color. The more colors in your charts/graphs/slides the better!

Seriously, my company is shifting over to the idea that every status presentation has to be color-coded. Projects are now either red, yellow, or green. Of course, there are projects that fall into the "orange" category: their status is truly screwed, but we don't want to let the managers see a red color, so we'll just tell them it's at risk (yellow).

When I say senior management is composed of the banal, foolish, and insipid, I am "not a team player." When other people treat senior management as if they are too stupid to understand things that aren't color-coded based on the traffic light model, they're just being good "team players." WTF?!

Note to all college students about to enter the corporate workplace: Dilbert isn't a cartoon; it's a three-panel documentary.

/Rant

That sounds familiar, I think part of it is "science envy"; especially in HR, as certainly in manufacturing, the quality (sorry, "business excellence") department should use science.

However I do think there is sometimes an attitude of "we want to make our job seem as complex as engineering, let's invent a priesthood, and let's take whichever trendy pseudoscientific theory and "analyse" situations with this, in a theological fashion (you really wouldn't want to test the validity of the theory, that would be heresy).

"I don't understand device physics, so why should engineers understand my work?"

Sometimes these theories might actually contain a (small) nugget of utility, but there is no way of knowing whether this is the case.


Anyway, back to the powerpoint presentation.

It is possible to make an animated 3-D graph. Showing 4-D graphs has to be good.

Has anyone else read "how to lie with Statistics" by Darrel Huff? A great, and short book; a lot of it discusses misleading graphs, which aren't actually wrong, but which convey the wrong impression, often by playing about with the scales.

[Furcifer]

That sounds familiar, I think part of it is "science envy"; especially in HR, as certainly in manufacturing, the quality (sorry, "business excellence") department should use science.

I agree with you, the business excellence department (love that one) should use a modified scientific method to track,monitor and control quality. But in the case of QS9000 they turned a simple idea "Say what you're going to do, do what you say you're going to do and write it down" into a monster. What you ended up with was SOP's (Standard Operating Procedures) for taking a poop in the morning! The multitude of interactions within the plant created this endless stream of paper work that bogged down manufacturing. When you're in a plant with 4000 people it worked OK, the paperwork could get spread out thinly to everyone. Now try implementing this in a factory with 20 people. For some reason the paperwork never scaled down to 1/80th that of the larger factory. I was charged with managing the transition from QS9000 to TS16949. Although TS16949 was created in an effort to streamline the QS9000 monster there was still a lot or redundancy. This meant the 1500 page QS9000 could be reduced down to 1000 page TS16949. The problem was, being in a smaller factory, I was required to be the Qaulity Manager, the Maintenance Manager and the Production Manager. Three hats, triple the work load and yet I was only drawing a single pay check. Of these three tasks guess which one took the back burner to the other two when push came to shove (and it always did)?



Sometimes these theories might actually contain a (small) nugget of utility, but there is no way of knowing whether this is the case.

Why does it seem though that these theories rely on assuming your work force is comprised of complete morons? Oh wait, maybe they got that right... ;) Sometimes I wonder though if HR actually interviews people, or they just run out onto the street and grab the first person walking by.


Anyway, back to the powerpoint presentation.
It is possible to make an animated 3-D graph. Showing 4-D graphs has to be good.

You kids writing this stuff down? :) 2-D good, 3-D better 4-D Best and for the real go getters out there 5-D will get you a promotion ;)

Has anyone else read "how to lie with Statistics" by Darrel Huff? A great, and short book; a lot of it discusses misleading graphs, which aren't actually wrong, but which convey the wrong impression, often by playing about with the scales.


I haven't, but Penn and Teller did an interesting show on how statistics and polling can be very misleading. Any poll can be manipulated simply by phrasing the question properly. I'm assuming this can be easily translated to graphs as well. If you get a chance check out YouTube for the video.

[Alric]

Whose up for Stopsixsigma.com? :)

The problem is that the name Six Sigma is probably copyrighted. I think a good step is to have this thread come up pretty high in a google search. Anyone know how to speed this process? It worked with our resident hero Robert Lancaster and his much more honorable cause of stopping Sylvia Browne.

[Father Dagon]

Black BeltSorry that I missed the part about the SS-belt system. Don't they realize that it not only sounds like krotty (http://www.bullshido.net/forums/showthread.php?t=31891), but that BB can also refer to "barebacking", albeit not the one with horses...

And regarcing CBS, I had an aunt that worked for an insurance company almost all her life. The stories she told me was totally Dilbert!

[Jason Smith]

Has anyone else read "how to lie with Statistics" by Darrel Huff? A great, and short book; a lot of it discusses misleading graphs, which aren't actually wrong, but which convey the wrong impression, often by playing about with the scales.

I'll second that recommendation -- definitely a book worth reading and rereading. For the best discussions of graphical and presentation excellence; what it is, what it looks like, and what it is not, the works of Edward Tufte are indispensible. He's written and self-published four books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence. If you have any interest in how to visual displays, buy these books. Be forewarned that they are expensive. They retail for $50 each, but you are paying for elaborate, full-color displays and fold outs on high-quality paper.

[jimbob]

I'll second that recommendation -- definitely a book worth reading and rereading. For the best discussions of graphical and presentation excellence; what it is, what it looks like, and what it is not, the works of Edward Tufte are indispensible. He's written and self-published four books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence. If you have any interest in how to visual displays, buy these books. Be forewarned that they are expensive. They retail for $50 each, but you are paying for elaborate, full-color displays and fold outs on high-quality paper.

I'll second those too, (I used the library)...

His blog is quite good as well.

[Billdave2]

I have been working in Quality Systems for 15 years now and manufacturing for over twenty. I have done it all I think, "Zero Defects", Lean, six sigma, etc. I remember when I firsts got involved in ISO and actually saw a SOP written on how to sweep the warehouse floor, including a map showing the directions and order the aisles were to be swept. I spent an untold amount of my own time getting ready for the ASQ Certified Quality Engineer exam. I have dealt with ISO, AS9100, QS9000, NADCAP, and now I am working for a company that converts and distributes Polyester and Polypropylene film and I am having to learn the Food Safety standards. Management always thinks that these systems like six sigma and lean and getting certified to quality standards are going to be simple, cheap and easy to implement. They are never any of these. The systems all have good points and useful tools. The thing about tools is that they all don't work for the same tasks. Well you can try, but it is like the old saying about "every tool is a hammer", they may work, just not well. I will never forget the Lean class I took where the instructor (with a straight face) said there were no processes that wouldn't benfit from being lean rather than batch. When I pointed out that in some cases it just isn't feasible due to size, changeover time, length of process, and/or economics, he said "oh just have a Kaizan event and kaizan it all away" like kaizan is a magic word like hocus pocus. Any time i hear about one of these "new" systems, I think about the one from Dilbert that Dogbert sold to the pointy haired boss. It consisted of paying intense attention to every detail and was called "Focused Attention to Detail" or FAD for short.

[Furcifer]

Any time i hear about one of these "new" systems, I think about the one from Dilbert that Dogbert sold to the pointy haired boss. It consisted of paying intense attention to every detail and was called "Focused Attention to Detail" or FAD for short.


lol, JSmith was right.

[jimbob]

I'll second that recommendation -- definitely a book worth reading and rereading. For the best discussions of graphical and presentation excellence; what it is, what it looks like, and what it is not, the works of Edward Tufte are indispensible. He's written and self-published four books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence. If you have any interest in how to visual displays, buy these books. Be forewarned that they are expensive. They retail for $50 each, but you are paying for elaborate, full-color displays and fold outs on high-quality paper.

Edward Tufte's PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB)

Why does everyone (else) at work finish their power point presentation with a slide containing the highly useful: "Any
Questions?".

I am trying to educate them by suggesting that

a) Powerpoint is only useful for presenting simple concepts, or providing supporting information in more complex discussions, with a supporting handout.
and
b)Why not finish on a summary, and just ask if there are any questions?

[Jason Smith]

Jimbob,

I liked your point b -- the next time someone ends a Power Point presentation with "Any Questions?" I just might stick up my hand to ask "What are the conclusions of this presentation?"

My earlier griping about color-coding for senior management has been outdated. Yesterday, one of our project managers came up with a tool for his Microsoft Project line items. Each line item has a color-coded emoticon. Green smilies indicate on schedule, a yellow face with a straight-lined mouth says that it's a little behind schedule and a red frownie face means at risk or seriously behind schedule. I swear to a god I don't believe in that I didn't make that up.

You know, if they're going to treat us like were elementary schoolers, at least they should give us a nap time.

[Jason Smith]

Deleted a double post.

[TjW]

Edward Tufte's PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB)

Why does everyone (else) at work finish their power point presentation with a slide containing the highly useful: "Any
Questions?".

I am trying to educate them by suggesting that

a) Powerpoint is only useful for presenting simple concepts, or providing supporting information in more complex discussions, with a supporting handout.
and
b)Why not finish on a summary, and just ask if there are any questions?

Since they're not limiting it, try: "If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long would it take a grasshopper with a wooden leg to kick all the seeds out of a dill pickle?"

[Furcifer]

"If a chicken and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long would it take a grasshopper with a wooden leg to kick all the seeds out of a dill pickle?"

That's in the SOP. Make sure he has safety glasses, and warn him about repetitive injuries associated with the kicking motion, our insurance is going through the roof. Once he's trained, make sure he signs off on the job in the book. I'm assuming he already has his Return to Work Order, if he hasn't you're gonna want him to stop by the nurses office first. He may be on light duty this week, I'm not sure. If that's the case then you'll need to train the chicken to do the job for the first four hours. Oh wait, the chicken out on mat leave, that's right, seems like that chickens off every other day. Why did they hire that chicken anyways? There was that rooster that applied for the position. Oh, that's right, not enough chickens in the company. Anyways, make sure whoever you get on the job knows to take every 10th pickle over to the fixture and check it. We've been having a problem with a lot of pickles getting out the door with seeds in them...

[Foolmewunz]

Under the category of "Other Corporate Delusions", I'd like to submit my first project of the month....

<Click>

The Conference Call: Good Tool, or Clever Dodge to Put the Workload and Blame on Someone on the Other Side of the World?

<Click>

Discuss amongst yourselves. Any Questions?

[jimbob]

Jimbob,

I liked your point b -- the next time someone ends a Power Point presentation with "Any Questions?" I just might stick up my hand to ask "What are the conclusions of this presentation?"

My earlier griping about color-coding for senior management has been outdated. Yesterday, one of our project managers came up with a tool for his Microsoft Project line items. Each line item has a color-coded emoticon. Green smilies indicate on schedule, a yellow face with a straight-lined mouth says that it's a little behind schedule and a red frownie face means at risk or seriously behind schedule. I swear to a god I don't believe in that I didn't make that up.

You know, if they're going to treat us like were elementary schoolers, at least they should give us a nap time.

Maybe we work for the same company? Actually no, because we have had this for about 2 years.

"Each project must have entirely green lights before passing throuh the gates"

One of my (anonomous) colleagues suggested that we could thus replace our senior managers with an excel macro, given the leeway they have.

[jimbob]

Actually I lied:

Here is the slide people tend to finish on:


http://forums.randi.org/imagehosting/1449447b7684599087.png

mutter mutter pointless waste of photons

[Kopji]

Our CEO made a statement last year to the effect that we'd probably never use six sigma outside of some very narrow target areas. Her background is mechanical R&D engineering. Manufacturing is almost always integrated with research and new product development. Everyone that joins the company pretty much drops all 'titles' for internal interactions and communications, even the PHd's and MD's.
Privately owned and focused on the products.
Going on 50 years now.

Corporate life is pretty good. :D

[Rhodamine 6G]

I briefly worked at a chemical company when the six sigma bug hit. They tried to apply it to QA/QC methods, and ended up only wasting everyone's time. There were occasions when the distinction between the variance caused by the analytical method and the variance caused by the plant samples put through said analytical methods was obviously not being respected.

My question is why, if the program is designed to isolate and control for variance, is it not called six sigma^2?

[supercorgi]

Edward Tufte's PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB)

I hate, hate, HATE, PowerPoint. No one knows how to use it properly. They use vague, unintelligible bullets to present ideas so that you have to take copious notes anyway in order to understand what they're talking about! Why can't they use a few more words to correctly convey their ideas. Tufte is great -- I took a 2 day seminar with him and it was very interesting. Why are concise, clear explanations so difficult for management personnel?

[supercorgi]

I love this thread! There is so much business BS out there. At one company I worked for, they started this campaign named "Quick, Quality, and Right." So if you were laid off, we referred to it as being "QQRed."

One thing I hate with a burning passion is MBOs (Management By Objectives). These nuisance tasks made up a significant portion of our compensation. All they were was deferred and conditional compensation. Every quarter we had to come up with 3 or 4 BS goals that were barely related to our actual jobs. Not to mention that we were working 45 ot 50 hours a week just to do our regular jobs -- now we had to spend time on this busy work just to complete our bonuses (which were supposed to be an actual part of our salary). Stupid, stupid, stupid.

[Father Dagon]

/.../ business BS /.../More like CBS, amirite?One thing I hate with a burning passion is MBOs (Management By Objectives). These nuisance tasks made up a significant portion of our compensation. All they were was deferred and conditional compensation. Every quarter we had to come up with 3 or 4 BS goals that were barely related to our actual jobs. Not to mention that we were working 45 ot 50 hours a week just to do our regular jobs -- now we had to spend time on this busy work just to complete our bonuses (which were supposed to be an actual part of our salary). Stupid, stupid, stupid.They say that planned economy works, only that no one has succeeded yet...

[jimbob]

SAP faces $100m fraud claim from Waste Management Inc for failing to deliver on a buzzword-filled promise. (http://www.accountingweb.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=181575&d=1025&dateformat=%25o-%25B)

or according to the WSJ quoted here (http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/engineering-design-problems/2008/04/buzzwords-behind-100m-sap-laws-1.html#more):

"SAP AG is being sued for failing to deliver an "out-of-the-box integrated end-to-end solution that increases...effectiveness." Amazingly, the meaning of these buzzwords are at the heart of a claim seeking more than $100 million.

There is more to it than this, but

"SAP further represented that the software was an 'integrated end-to-end solution'. Unknown to Waste Management, this 'United States' version... was undeveloped, untested and defective."

A blog about it on Electronics Weekly's "Made By Monkeys" blog (http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/engineering-design-problems/2008/04/buzzwords-behind-100m-sap-laws-1.html#more)

Our company "uses" SAP...

[PAC]

I spent three decades, mostly in manufacturing, working in companies that
tried a lot of the programs discussed here. Most of these programs were
good ideas and approaches. Most of them failed. A brief list of my experience:

Most top officers do not understand their own processes.

Most top officers are looking for the "magic bean". Let's put this in place and all will be solved.

Most top officers have no idea of the personal environment in their organizations...the real day to day forces that create postitive or negative
results. Most don't realize that this is where they must first begin to sort things out then apply approaches for improvement.

A quick story. In 2001 I was able to convince management to allow me to set up a visit to a company that had taken some strategies and turned a 100
year old company from the edge of closing to great sucess. We took ten people on this trip. It started with our vice president of operations arguing with our host that "this could not possibley work" and a meeting upon our return of why it "would not work for us". All of the concepts were solid. The results were there to see. However, it meant that all of those who went on this trip would have to give up the places they had carved out for themselves. They would have to learn and think and do. None would accept this. No changes were made. I was eventually pushed out of this company. This company currently has about half its former production level and continues to slip. They have not accepted any of the concepts presented to them but continue on the old path. They now publish articles complaining about unfair competition, unfair overseas practices, etc. They still can't see their own incompetence. The others on the trip are mostly still with the company, still in their precious spaces and still destoying the opportunities.

So what does this have to do with the thread? All of these programs can be
great. It is not the programs as much as it is the environment.

So, we hear that American manufacturing can not compete with foreign labor or protectionist sysytems. All crap! American industry is destroying itself.