Conversation With A Black Belt

So I survived my first compulsory Six Sigma brainwashing session this afternoon. The material we covered was bone dry, boring as hell. We were being indoctrinated in the ways of the Six Sigma White Belt by a tall slender man with bright blonde hair. Our teacher reminded me of a full grown successful Nazi eugenics experiment due to his master race appearance. I’ve never seen the guy on campus here before. My guess is he’s one of those cubicle dwelling drones from Building 2 upper, or maybe he’s buried somewhere in the bowels of Building 1. Whatever he does here the man has now apparently been trained extensively in Six Sigma by outside consultants. He’s supposed to be one of those experts in the methodology- a Six Sigma Black Belt. As he was running through power point slides and scribbling on a dry erase board while walking around the edge of our conference table I half expected him to kung fu chop me at the back of my neck with no warning. Maybe it had something to do with my apparent lack of interest during the two hour class. I don’t know for certain.

We covered far too much material over an inadequate amount of time. With all the bar charts and diagrams I felt like this was overkill, a solution to a problem we didn’t really have. Nobody seemed to have a better idea of Six Sigma or a direction on how to employ it in their daily tasks. I could see it in their faces. Waiting patiently for my fellow zombies to leave I sat in my chair thinking about asking one question of this Black Belt uber man. He didn’t notice I was still there. He immediately began collecting training materials strewn about the room and straightening his papers in a case as soon as the course was closed. When he realized a straggler was loitering I mumbled something about wanting to yap for a minute about Six Sigma on the down low. From his reaction it was obvious mister Black Belt thought it odd, but he didn’t tell me to get lost. I hung out.

When I felt like the flock was herding itself down a hallway and it was safe to speak candidly I began to rant.

“Okay so since you’re the expert on Six Sigma I wanted to ask a question. If you’ve been here for a while you know we have the Business Metrics program which is a long standing part of Bill and Dave’s workplace culture. It’s quite comprehensive. Now we’ve got Six Sigma being rushed in here like it’s the greatest thing ever, and I find myself dismissing it as little more than an elaborate repackaging of common sense data collection tools that are already widely accepted in business and industry. The six standard deviation junk doesn’t do much for me. Parts per million factoring on an instrument line I only ship thirty or so units a month from is kinda dumb. What I want to know is, is Six Sigma in your opinion the Emperor’s New Clothes? I mean, you’ve got the Black Belt now so what do you think?”

Mister Black Belt stopped cleaning up the conference room and sat down across the table from me. He kind of looked around to make sure no one was within ear shot and he said while nodding, “Yes. It’s just a repackaging job. They spent a lot of money putting five or six of us through a crash course in Six Sigma. For the most part everything we already do here is covered in Six Sigma. It’s redundant.”

I was surprised by his honesty. I did not expect that kind of reaction from him actually. Since I had nothing better to do I anticipated our Six Sigma Sensei to debate me on the subject for a while. With any luck I might make him angry which would be entertaining, until he used his lethal Six Sigma factoring skills to kill me. Instead I think I may have discovered another wise employee who saw through the corporate bullshit but was keeping his head down in an effort to not get himself laid off.

“Will Six Sigma change anything here?”

“Probably not,” He said.

That’s exactly what I was thinking.

~ by factorypeasant on June 17, 2009.