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By Forrest Breyfogle III

Exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming book Integrated Enterprise Excellence — Volume 4: A Management and Black Belt Guide for taking Lean Six Sigma and Traditional Scorecards to the Next Level, by Forrest Breyfogle III following introduction by Andrew K. Reese.

The trouble with being a leader is that with every step you take forward, you raise expectations that you will take another step, then another step and still another. For project leaders, that repeating cycle at least has a concrete end point, when all the project's goals are met. When you are a thought-leader, on the other hand, your followers expect you to be continually moving forward, producing new insights into your chosen field on a regular basis and pushing the envelope with innovation after innovation.

For the past two decades, Forrest Breyfogle III has accepted the challenge of being a thought-leader in his chosen field, which revolves around the application of Lean Six Sigma techniques to make good companies great. Breyfogle founded his own company, Smarter Solutions, in 1992 after a 24-year career at IBM, where he applied Six Sigma to testing, development, manufacturing and service organizations.

At the helm of Austin, Texas-based Smarter Solutions, Breyfogle has conducted workshop sessions throughout the world, helping companies improve their bottom line and customer satisfaction through the wise application of techniques that are beyond traditional Six Sigma techniques. Moreover, in seven books authored and co-authored over the past 15 years, along with and more than 50 articles written for industry journals, Breyfogle has advanced the theory and practice of Lean Six Sigma, forming his own brand of enterprise improvement that he has dubbed Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE).

Six Sigma was founded in the 1980s within Motorola, and Jack Welch subsequently applied the quality improvement tool within GE. "Lean" was appended to Six Sigma later to expand the focus of improvement projects beyond quality to encompass waste reduction as well. But throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma remained focused on the completion of projects: companies looked for processes that could be improved within the organization; identified discrete projects to accomplish the prescribed improvement; assigned staff trained in Lean Six Sigma to carry out those projects; then set metrics for how they would measure the success of those projects, typically dollars saved.

And therein, Breyfogle believes, lies the problem with traditional Lean Six Sigma. "We pound our chests about how much we've saved using Lean Six Sigma deployments within the company," Breyfogle says. "Unfortunately, oftentimes no one can actually find the money, and even when the savings can be verified through the accounting system, the savings are not necessarily aligned with the bottom line benefits to the organization."

The issue is that when companies establish scorecards to measure the success of their improvement projects, those scorecards in and of themselves do not provide a roadmap for how to make the targeted improvements. "Just setting goals without having any way of achieving those goals, it can lead to the wrong activities," Breyfogle says. "It's really important to have measurements that drive the right kinds of activities." In his forthcoming book, Integrated Enterprise Excellence — Volume 4: A Management and Black Belt Guide for taking Lean Six Sigma and Traditional Scorecards to the Next Level, Breyfogle tackles this conundrum and outlines an approach for taking Lean Six Sigma and scorecards "to the next level" with his Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) methodology.