Question 12

You have co-authored two books, and are about to write the third one. Please share with us the key messages from the two books you have written.

The first book I had the privilege of co-authoring really was one of those life goals, write about some of your experiences within a book. That [book] happened to be called Customer Centered Six Sigma. At the time we put the book in place it wasn’t necessarily a resource on Six Sigma, but the publisher needed a resource on Six Sigma about the time the book came out. But the whole concept of what we talked about was customer centered Six Sigma. The idea was:

·        [How] you understand the requirements of customers, then

·        How do you define the process that support those requirements, then

·        How do you measure the stuff internally to make sure those processes are operating under control and delivering on those requirements, and then

·        How do you measure that externally via customer satisfaction surveys, complaints, or something like that to get the customer’s assessment in terms of how well you are doing, so it really is a customer-centered, customer-focused environment, and then

·        How does Six Sigma play into that to help improve process efficiencies and do a better job in terms of delivering products and services to customers.

The second book, which is called Implementing Strategic Change, essentially talks about how you go in and assess an organization’s health, and then using a number of different tools and techniques; [the book] talks about [their] advantages and disadvantages. As you remember I mentioned earlier that all models are flawed and some are useful, so understanding [is important of] what a model can do for you. And then what are the tools and techniques that an organization can use to then help close those performance gaps? We talked really about balanced scorecard – that would be one tool or technique. There is a lot of discussion about ethics and ethical behavior throughout the organization to perform that way. The second book is about that.

The third book will be on customer loyalty, so [it is] just taking one more tool or technique, a subset of [what is in] the first two books. [It will] talk about high [customer] loyalty to improve financial performance.