I went into my local Barnes & Noble looking for a book and decided to check if they carried my book, Lean Six Sigma Demystified. There were four rows of business books on management, leadership, sales, and so on. The “quality” section, consisting of about 15 titles, was on the bottom shelf of the last row of books.

You would think that if there was a methodology that would help most companies cut costs by a third, double profits, and boost productivity that it would get more play in bookstores. It doesn’t.

Yogi Berra once said, “If people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?” I have found the same is true of statistical process control (SPC).

I am no longer surprised by the number of people who say, “I’m working on my Green Belt/Black Belt certification, but I’m not sure how to apply Six Sigma to [health care, telecom, hotels, food, transportation]—insert your service industry here. They just can’t seem to figure out how to translate manufacturing-oriented training and case studies to their industry. It’s not that difficult, but that’s what I do most of the time: help people translate the “map” used in manufacturing to their particular industry.

At a recent health-care conference I had a conversation with Mary, a Six Sigma Black Belt for a 700-bed hospital. She told me that the hospital had only a few copies of Minitab software, which was shared by several people. She was always being asked to close out of the program so that someone else could use it.