Page 210 - Lean six sigma demystified

188 Lean Six Sigma DemystifieD

Become a Lean Six Sigma Detective

In the August 2005 issue of Business Week, Michael Hopkins explored the
best seller Freakonomics and it’s authors’ strategy for using data to explore and
explain the world. They wrote: “Morality represents the way that people
would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually
does work.”
The November 2005 issue of Fast Company called 2005 the Year of the
Economist. Why? Because books like Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores
the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner became a
best seller. Financial columnist, Tim Harford says: “The idea of the economist
as a detective hero suddenly became easy to sell once Freakonomics climbed the
best seller lists.”
Suzanne Gluck, the author’s agent, says that people are using freakonomics
as a code word for unconventional wisdom. What’s the secret, Fast Company
asks? “It’s just math,” replies coauthor Dubner.
Isn’t that the essence of Lean Six Sigma? Using numbers to explore the hid-
den side of defects, delays, and costs in ways that reveal the hidden gold mine
of profits wasted every day in businesses large and small.
What’s the “secret sauce” that makes Steven Levitt so successful? Coauthor
Dubner says: “He seemed to look at things not so much as an academic but as
a very smart and curious explorer—a documentary filmmaker, perhaps or a
forensic investigator or a bookie whose markets ranged from sports to crime to
pop culture.” He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story
that no one else has found. The New York Times magazine said he’s “a kind of
intellectual detective trying to figure things out.”

Isn’t that what Lean Six Sigma is at its core? Sifting through piles of data
like an intellectual detective trying to explain the hidden side of defects,
delay and cost?

Solution: The Data Strategy

In Hopkins’s article, he identifies the key strategies used by Steven Levitt and
his coauthor, Steven Lubner. They are

1. Use your data. Experts use their informational advantages to serve their
own agendas. Hence the numbers can be bent to prove whatever I want to
prove. It’s amazing how many company managers want to use data to