Integrating Lean Six SIGMA and High-Performance Organizations: Leading the Charge Toward Dramatic, Rapid, and Sustainable Improvement

Devane does it again! Co-author of the popular: "The Change Handbook"; he now provides us with a roadmap of breakthrough thinking in the areas of Lean Six Sigma and High Performance Organizations! From the opening lines in the Preview we are invited into examining the crisis of improvement programs that face organizations today. The story concludes having introduced the reader into a unique journey examining the combinations and possibilities of these methods and what is fundamentally required of leadership. This book is masterfully written offering a balanced blend of theory, practicality and insightful breakthroughs, cracking the puzzle of achieving sustainable organizational results. The skilled OD practitioner will readily see the author's depth of expertise and scholarship displayed in the fields of change and leadership. He comfortably ties together the soft and hard skills necessary to accomplish what so many efforts fail to achieve and overlook in their improvement programs. His main divisions of the book entitled, Practical Foundations and Pragmatic Practice, allow the novice to understand their working intentions and how to effectively apply them. The seasoned person will be able to jump in where they are most comfortable. His creative literary style, with a liberal combination of tables, charts, exhibits, figures, and war stories makes reading a pleasure and captures your attention. The repetitive structure within the Leader's Guide includes activity maps, leader to do lists, tool applications and pragmatic tips, allowing the reader to develop a rhythm in learning the principles and applications being discussed. The generous glossary and reference materials will greatly assist in allowing you to deepen your understanding or expand your resources in the field. In addition, the book's companion website, www.LeanSixSigmaHPO.com, provides helpful supporting information for leaders serious about simultaneously addressing technical tool deployment and cultural aspects of large-scale process improvement efforts.

Most books I've seen on the topics of Lean, Six Sigma, and culture change suggest a one-size-fits all approach that is detailed by the author(s) in their specific book. Usually they are plugging one methodology that supposedly has universal application across all industries and all sized companies. Not so with this book. This book, written for leaders, provides a succinct array of principles, general approach templates, and common traps for each stage of an improvement process. Rather than advocating detailed, sequential steps to take, the book offers up proven best practices and a general flow that leaders may, or may not apply based on their specific organizational circumstances. Another book I highly recommend that offers alternative approaches to improvement is Peter Pande's book What Is Six Sigma? A fixed, rigid improvement approach that is not customized to accommodate an organization's unique characteristics is doomed to expensive failure, and these two books get that concept.

Many books present the hard tools of Six Sigma. Many books present how to do change manageemnt, or the "soft side" of continuous improvement projects. This is the first book I've seen that provides leaders with a clear set of principles and a general approach for integrating hard and soft aspects of Six Sigma to achieve dramatic, sustainable results. The first third of the book presents concepts on Lean, Six Sigma, and High Performance Organizations. The final two-thirds of the book is organized according to the implementation stages of an enterprise-wide Six Sigma project. For each stage the book provides pragmatic tips on topics such as stage outputs, common traps, key large goup meetings, leader "To Do" checklists, counterintuitive elements, and leadership tools. In addition to the book's comprehensive coverage of leadership issues for large-scale process improvement, there's also an extensive reference section in the back that points leaders to other books and web-sites containing valuable leadership tips. Readers should be aware that this book does not delve into detailed statistical tools that improvement teams use. Rather, the book focuses on leadership aspects so I would recommend another book like one of Breyfogle's for people interested in "hard tools" of Six Sigma.

This book is chockfull of golden advice nuggets for leaders of big changes in organizations. It shows how integrating the disciplines of Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, and High-Performance Organizations can provide a robust combination of quick short-term wins, significant long-term wins based on rigourous data collection and analysis, and sustainable gains based on increased employee motivation. I found the Leadership Checklists that were provided for each of the book's 5 phases of an improvement effort to be particularly helpful. The book provides an excellent reference for busy leaders as its organization, indexing, and exhibit list make it easy to quickly find specific topics of interest.

I like the way the book devotes time up front talking about the theory aspects of Lean, Six Sigma, and High-Performance Organizations and how they fit together. Knowing the theory and principles in the first part of the book helped me understand the "why" and "when" to implement tactics presented in the second part of the book. I found the book's organization to be a clear, logical way to introduce this complex topic. The table of contents is:Part 1. Practical Foundations1. Introduction to Lean Six Sigma2. Introduction to High-Performance Organizations3. Lean Six Sigma and High-Performance Organizations CombinedPart 2. Pragmatic Practice Section 1. The Fundamentals1. Lessons Learned from Integrating Lean Six Sigma and HPO2. Leadership Fundamentals3. Useful Distinctions4. Leader's Basic Toolkit Section 2. The Leader's Stage-by-Stage Guide1. Initiation 2. Direction Setting3. Design4. Implementation5. Operations & Continuous ImprovementEach of the five chapters in Section 2 contains the chapter topics: Activity Map and Leader To Do List, Tools Application, and Pragmatic Tips.AppendixGlossary of termsLarge-group interventionsReferencesThis is definitely not a book to be read in one sitting. However, its comprehensive treatment about how leaders can blend "hard" improvement approaches like Six Sigma and Lean with "soft" aspects such as change management and intrinsic motivation make it a worthwhile book to have in any leader's library.