Three Vital Rules for Creating Value

The Way to Business Success

In today’s business environment, corporate leaders must be able to create and retain a workforce of world-class leaders whose focus is value-centric, not just profit, cost or quality focused. To accomplish this in a rapid and fruitful manner, there are three vital rules.

First, business leaders, at all levels, must seek new and better ways to guide their respective organizations to a more definitive and collective understanding of what value is and means, as well as how it can be created, extended and sustained over time – in everything they do. To achieve this imperative, new ways of creative thinking and innovative patterns of reasoning must be introduced into the organization over a relatively short period of time.

Second, business leaders must embody better approaches for introducing, propagating and sustaining those new ways of thinking and reasoning. Third, the organization must expand its horizon of impact to include their base of customers and suppliers, as well as the communities in which they operate.

But why is it necessary to alter an organization’s pattern of reasoning to create and sustain value? Simply stated, every breakthrough in the creation of additional value starts with a fresh perspective or idea; and the creation of a new perspective or superior idea is the result of how a person (or group of people) navigates the network of prevailing circumstances and possibilities.

In other words, the organization must isolate the key points of good business and then describe how those points interconnect to enhance delivered value. For the typical company (Four Sigma), simply repeating or tweaking their existing ways and means will likely not aggregate to a force that is capable of making a profound and substantive difference within the organization’s business ecosystem.

Thinking About Thinking

Once a system of thinking has been developed, tested and proven, it must then be packaged and adopted. On the heels of this, the new system of thinking must be uniformly deployed (and reinforced) across the target organization. In this manner, the creation of additional value can be increased, accelerated or otherwise enriched to such an extent the needle of business is moved in a positive direction.

Perhaps this is best expressed by the age old saying: “Do what you did and you’ll get what you got.” Therefore, one can easily conclude that any type or form of breakthrough in the creation of business value is almost always preceded by a breakthrough in thinking. Consequently, changing the pattern of thinking (or system of reasoning) to a superior form will likely result in breakthroughs to higher levels of value creation.

By changing the way in which a leader thinks about how to achieve a business dream, goal or aspiration, the target organization can dramatically increase their odds of business success; and do it faster in a more effective and efficient manner. Remember, to get the right thing, you must do the right thing; and to do the right thing, you must know the right things; and to know the right things, you must value the right things.

To illustrate the latter point, consider an organization that does not value divergent thinking. In such cases, the likelihood of enjoying higher levels of innovation would be greatly reduced. On the flip side, if a particular organization values divergent thinking, but discourages convergent thinking, the fruits of such reasoning will likely not be realized owing to a lack of emphasis on execution. Therefore, when it comes to the creation of value, it should now be obvious that the optimal position is to celebrate both divergent and convergent thinking.

The Six Sigma Way of Thinking

The Six Sigma Way of Thinking is about a proven, systematic, time-tested way of reasoning. It is a way of thinking that has been proven to increase a work team’s odds of success – in everything they do, but done so in a highly actionable, accountable, repeatable and teachable way. In this context, The Six Sigma Way of Thinking is a simple, repeatable and teachable way to drive innovative thinking within the leadership resource of an organization. As an added benefit, it also serves to deeply embed critical thinking skills into an organization’s workforce and culture.

Over a period of about 30 years, The Six Sigma Way of Thinking has been refined and systematized. It is well recognized by many of world’s most respected industry leaders, embraced by top universities and endorsed by leading professional societies. This incredibly powerful way of reasoning has demonstrated its ability to transform ordinary work groups into high performance teams that consistently deliver breakthroughs in the creation of value.

The Six Sigma Way of Thinking can be rapidly deployed throughout any type of enterprise, regardless of product or service orientation – from the bottom-up or top-down. It represents a way of thinking that can be quickly adopted and implemented by individuals and teams alike. In this sense, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking can be immediately leveraged by leaders to better direct work teams toward the realization of a business dream or stretch goal.

Owing to its simplicity and standardized structure, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking is a natural way for cross-functional teams to better communicate and more effectively coordinate their improvement efforts. In this context, it can alter the DNA of an enterprise; and when this happens, the organization can begin to produce better, higher value-based results.

Because of its broad base of power and eloquent simplicity, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking can escape the classical boundaries of a work team and be used by its members to bring about a higher quality of life. In other words, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking can be applied in your work life, practiced in your personal life and adapted to your home life (like teaching young adults how to succeed in life). In this sense, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking is a universal way of closing the gap between current and future performance. In a nutshell, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking is about how to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

The Features and Benefits

Many say that leadership is an elusive quality. As a lighthouse rises from the rocks of an ocean cliff to throw its piercing beam off to the horizon, leaders cast their mind’s light into the darkness of ambiguity to show others the way. Naturally, the development of world-class leaders is always of vital concern to a business enterprise. Great leaders have the ability to create a compelling vision and then show others the way – but do so in a systematic and deterministic way that is simple, manageable, actionable, repeatable, and teachable.

The Six Sigma Way of Thinking is a time-tested way for leaders and workers alike to significantly enhance their process of reasoning. It’s a way of thinking that can deliver superior solutions to pressing business issues – anytime, anywhere and do so under any circumstances. It’s a way of thinking that enables business leaders (at all levels) to rapidly innovate, deploy and implement higher quality business solutions. In this sense, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking is a way to better unify, focus and guide individual contributors and work teams to the realization of a breakthrough in the creation of value – in everything they do.

As a tool for leadership development, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking was specifically designed for executives, managers, supervisors, and team leaders that seek to learn a more effective way of organizing, unifying, and mobilizing people in a common direction for the purpose of creating breakthrough improvements in the creation of value. Beyond question, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking can be effectively used by any size business, regardless of its product type or service orientation.

Over the last 30 years, this powerful way of reasoning has brought verifiable breakthroughs to many of the world’s top corporations. A very large number of these experiences are well documented from beginning to end, thereby providing the world with many vital “lessons learned.” These lessons were then carefully researched by a team of renowned practitioners and subject-matter-experts to reveal the Vital Few – the lessons that were common to all cases where sustainable quantum change was realized in the creation of value.

Leveraging The Six Sigma Way of Thinking

Built upon the foundation of many Six Sigma deployments and projects, this proven way of reasoning reflects the pattern of leadership beliefs, values, and practices that can be effectively and efficiently used to guide work teams to the creation and sustainability of value. In this sense, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking is a universal way of reasoning that is backed by verifiable successes across a wide array of businesses and industries.

The Six Sigma Way of Thinking can be rapidly deployed and easily implemented to support a wide array of business needs. For example, the Body-of-Knowledge (BOK) associated with the Six Sigma Way of Thinking can be deployed and implemented as stand-alone program, employed as a “front end” for a Lean Six Sigma or Continuous Improvement Program, or integrated into other types of improvement programs.

In this regard, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking can also be easily laced into “new employee” training, or serve to better focus and extend the power of common management programs. It can even be used as an “all hands” training course to support virtually any type of strategic improvement initiative. Of course, the Six Sigma Way of Thinking can be deployed as a leadership development tool or serve as a foundation for executive coaching.