Six Sigma is the single most effective problem-solving methodology for improving business and organizational performance.  There’s not a business, technical, or process challenge that can’t be improved with Six Sigma.  The world’s top corporations have used it to increase their profits collectively by more than $100 billion over the past ten years.  In certain corporations, Six Sigma proficiency on your resume is now a prerequisite to moving into a position in management.  If you’re part of a Fortune 500 company – particularly a manufacturing company – chances are you’ve heard of Six Sigma.  You may even have been through a training regimen and been part of a corporate initiative or an improvement project.  If so, you know the capabilities of Six Sigma; you have witnessed its achievements firsthand.
 
The Missing Link
 
Since Six Sigma initiatives typically enjoy strong board room support, what is the missing link?  Why is Six Sigma so often a victim of the same implementation barriers that cause 70% of all major change efforts to produce sub-optimized results, non-sustained executive commitment, loss of leadership alignment, resistance to change, poor communications, and no reinforcement to name a few.  
 
More problematic is that absent a structured implementation approach, the probability of a deployment being on time, on budget, and to specification, is very low.  The end result: good solutions remain on the shelf, or the cycle time to get to adoption is very long.  The answer lies partially in the fact that the Six Sigma methodology lacks robust tools when it comes to implementation.  
 
The book Organizational Shift connects the missing link.