REPLY SD Impact on National Government Policies (SD6137)

[System Dynamics Mailing List]

Posted by  "John Gunkler" <jgunkler at sprintmail.com>
Kim Warren asks (re:  Six Sigma, balanced scorecard, etc.):  What did they
do that we missed?

My previous posting, I think, begins to answer -- to wit, some of them (such
as balanced scorecard, Lean enterprise, and value-based mgmt) were
"simplifiable" (easy for "lay" people to believe they understood), and
others (Six Sigma) while not simplifiable had easy-to-understand strong
positive consequences.

I don't presume to know what has happened with every use of SD in business
because, as Dr. Warren mentions, businesses have reasons to be somewhat
close-mouthed about that -- but there are very few dramatic "positive
consequences" cases that I'm aware of -- at least none on the scale of the
success which caused GE to trumpet the use of Six Sigma.  And what successes
have been achieved are not publicized like GE's Jack Welch did.  (Few things
are.)

Three of the things that made Jack Welch's message about Six Sigma so
effective were (1) Jack Welch was saying it at a time when he was considered
the "genius" of American business; (2) he had hard evidence of success to
point to (primarily in GE and Allied Signal, but also in other companies);
and (3) the methodology behind the success was plausibly seen as causing the
success (arising as it did out of the work of Deming and Juran in Japan,
where one business after another was kicking our American butts.)

So, obviously (grin) ...

1.  We need someone like GE's Jack Welch -- someone with clout in the larger
community -- to continually bang the drum (to change musical metaphors a
bit) for SD.  [Fat chance we can create this without a huge dose of luck.]
2.  We need to make more of the successes we achieve.
3.  We need to make SD simplifiable (as I wrote earlier).  [I believe we did
some work on this listserv a couple of years ago on the SD "elevator speech"
-- but did not actually create one that was effective.  I know that I
haven't come up with one that works very well yet.]  

What I'm saying, I suppose, is that creating an easy-to-understand
explanation of the benefits of using SD is a non-trivial exercise that we
ought to engage in (again).  And we ought not think that we're going to
succeed without putting in some serious effort and time.


John
Posted by  "John Gunkler" <jgunkler at sprintmail.com>
posting date  Thu, 4 Jan 2007 15:34:59 -0500