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Getting Started in Six Sigma
The basics behind the Six Sigma quality control technique
Six Sigma is designed to achieve excellence in customer service and measure deviation from the ideal. It provides a process for placing value on the intangible nature of quality control. The underlying theories of Six Sigma are highly technical and complex. This book is a basic guide to those who are new to the concept, and though this is a complex subject, the concepts involved are not too complex for readers to grasp. Getting Started in Six Sigma demonstrates how an employee or supervisor can implement Six Sigma successfully without having to become technically familiar with process-oriented models or statistical modeling.
Six Sigma is designed to achieve excellence in customer service and measure deviation from the ideal. It provides a process for placing value on the intangible nature of quality control. The underlying theories of Six Sigma are highly technical and complex. This book is a basic guide to those who are new to the concept, and though this is a complex subject, the concepts involved are not too complex for readers to grasp. Getting Started in Six Sigma demonstrates how an employee or supervisor can implement Six Sigma successfully without having to become technically familiar with process-oriented models or statistical modeling.
- GenresBusiness
224 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2004
2 people are currently reading
22 people want to read
About the author
Michael C. Thomsett
182 books13 followersMichael C. Thomsett is an expert in technical analysis and stock markets. He has published dozens of books on the topic as well as peer-reviewed papers, magazine articles, and blog entries. He has been writing professionally since 1978 and his best-selling, Getting Started in Options (John Wiley & Sons) is currently in its 10th edition (published by DeGruyter with a new title, “Options”) and has sold over 350,000 copies. The author lives near Nashville, Tennessee and he writes full time.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 11, 2012
great input on the lean manufacturing process used by many of today's top companies. Boring for most, great for MBA studies
April 26, 2026
It's on older book, and six sigma is a bit dated, but still probably not the best starting point for any of it. I feel like he's trying to skirt around a lot of rigorous and technical detail, as if he's expecting you to already be familiar with the fundamentals - like this is a companion to a more academic presentation?
One thing that bugs me endlessly is he keeps saying achieving six sigma is impossible, but ... surely the whole point is that it *is*? 100% is impossible, so we're falling back to asymptotically approaching it, with "sigma" giving a logarithmic measure, and "six sigma" being a high but reachable aspiration?
Another thing is, because he doesn't rigorously define these terms or their theoretical justifications, it comes across as weird jargon. Especially if your intention is for your methods to be understandable to whole organisations - if you start by redefining a lot of everyday terms and requiring that everyone is motivated by "higher sigma", that's a cult, everyone in that organisation is going to think you're weird cultists.
There's a bunch of things early on too, where he insists that this is the only possible way to run an efficient organisation. Which is weird because you hear that echoed so much in later organisational theories, agile, devops, SRE etc - they all have this infuriating pattern of thinking that they've finally cracked the code of "getting a group of people to work together on a shared goal", and that all endeavours before this point have been doomed to failure. People *did* accomplish things before Motorola in 1986, I promise!
One thing that bugs me endlessly is he keeps saying achieving six sigma is impossible, but ... surely the whole point is that it *is*? 100% is impossible, so we're falling back to asymptotically approaching it, with "sigma" giving a logarithmic measure, and "six sigma" being a high but reachable aspiration?
Another thing is, because he doesn't rigorously define these terms or their theoretical justifications, it comes across as weird jargon. Especially if your intention is for your methods to be understandable to whole organisations - if you start by redefining a lot of everyday terms and requiring that everyone is motivated by "higher sigma", that's a cult, everyone in that organisation is going to think you're weird cultists.
There's a bunch of things early on too, where he insists that this is the only possible way to run an efficient organisation. Which is weird because you hear that echoed so much in later organisational theories, agile, devops, SRE etc - they all have this infuriating pattern of thinking that they've finally cracked the code of "getting a group of people to work together on a shared goal", and that all endeavours before this point have been doomed to failure. People *did* accomplish things before Motorola in 1986, I promise!
January 6, 2018
I read the book to familiarize myself with the six sigma concept before studying for my Six Sigma Green Belt Exam. The book provides an easy illustration of many difficult concepts, however, you still need to review other advance resources if you are reading this for six sigma exams' preparation.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews