Story update 11/23/2010: A paragraph was added to the end of this case study to reflect the current state of the company's quality initiatives.

You just finished your audit, and your registrar has handed you a brand-new certificate. Now, what do you do to make sure everyone knows about it? Most likely you’ll send an e-mail out to the entire company, prepare a press release, post an announcement on your web site, and so on. But sometimes, these announcements don’t talk about certification in a technically correct manner. When you use the right terminology in each and every marketing piece, it brings added credibility to you and to every other certified organization.

We all have one hiding over there in the groan zone. It’s the unfinished project that lives in a strange sort of limbo. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminds us in The Black Swan (Random House, 2007), the longer a project goes unfinished, there is an exponential increase in the time to finish the project. Sound familiar?

Ihave had a big smile on my face for much of the last month because I’ve had the opportunity to visit progressive organizations on three continents to look at their efforts to create lean value streams.

After a meal at a local Chinese restaurant, my fortune cookie said, “If you keep too busy learning the tricks of the trade, you may never learn the trade.” When I think about how this applies to Six Sigma, it seems obvious that far too much Six Sigma training is dedicated to the tricks of the trade and not enough to the actual trade.

The only thing worse for companies than making bad decisions is having a deeply flawed decision-making process. Every business leader faces stressful situations that require immediate action, but the final choices can often by tainted by a destructive trio of hubris, arrogance, and denial. 

In a legendary 70-year career, Peter Drucker, “the father of modern management,” revolutionized modern business practices, transforming management theory into a serious discipline. His influence was far-reaching, extending to developments that included decentralization, privatization, and empowerment. He was among the first to address the emergence of the information society and in 1959; he coined the term “knowledge worker.”