2007/6/3 發出通知
馬上發現除了Six Sigma: So Yesterday之外，封面故事為：
An eye-opening
cover
story about innovation and
cost-control is in this week's BusinessWeek ("At 3M, A Struggle Between
Efficiency And Creativity",
6/11/07)
事實上，我在數周前查3M公司網站關於Six
Sigma，就發現該段（唯一一段）說明，簡直是說反話，不可思議！
At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity
How CEO George Buckley is managing the yin and yang of
discipline and imagination
Not too many years ago, the temple of management was General Electric
(GE ). Former CEO Jack Welch was the high
priest, and his disciples spread the word to executive suites throughout the
land. One of his most highly regarded followers, James McNerney, was quickly
snatched up by 3M after falling short in the closely watched race to succeed
Welch. 3M's board considered McNerney a huge prize, and the company's stock
jumped nearly 20% in the days after Dec. 5, 2000, when his selection as CEO was
announced. The mere mention of his name made everyone richer.
McNerney was the first outsider to lead the insular St. Paul (Minn.) company
in its 100-year history. He had barely stepped off the plane before he
announced he would change the DNA of the place. His playbook was vintage GE.
McNerney axed 8,000 workers (about 11% of the workforce), intensified the
performance-review process, and tightened the purse strings at a company that
had become a profligate spender. He also imported GE's vaunted Six Sigma
programa series of management techniques designed to decrease production
defects and increase efficiency. Thousands of staffers became trained as Six
Sigma "black belts." The plan appeared to work: McNerney jolted 3M's moribund
stock back to life and won accolades for bringing discipline to an organization
that had become unwieldy, erratic, and sluggish.
Then, four and a half years after arriving, McNerney abruptly left for a bigger
opportunity, the top job at Boeing (BA ).
Now his successors face a challenging question: whether the relentless emphasis
on efficiency had made 3M a less creative company. That's a vitally important
issue for a company whose very identity is built on innovation. After all, 3M
is the birthplace of masking tape, Thinsulate, and the Post-it note. It is the
invention machine whose methods were consecrated in the influential 1994
best-seller Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras. But those old
hits have become distant memories. It has been a long time since the debut of
3M's last game-changing technology: the multilayered optical films that coat
liquid-crystal display screens. At the company that has always prided itself on
drawing at least one-third of sales from products released in the past five
years, today that fraction has slipped to only one-quarter.
Those results are not coincidental. Efficiency programs such as Six Sigma are
designed to identify problems in work processesand then use rigorous
measurement to reduce variation and eliminate defects. When these types of
initiatives become ingrained in a company's culture, as they did at 3M,
creativity can easily get squelched. After all, a breakthrough innovation is
something that challenges existing procedures and norms. "Invention is by its
very nature a disorderly process," says current CEO George Buckley, who has
dialed back many of McNerney's initiatives. "You can't put a Six Sigma process
into that area and say, well, I'm getting behind on invention, so I'm going to
schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on Friday. That's not
how creativity works." McNerney declined to comment for this story.
PROUD CREATIVE CULTURE
The tension that Buckley is trying to managebetween innovation and
efficiencyis one that's bedeviling CEOs everywhere. There is no doubt that the
application of lean and mean work processes at thousands of companies, often
through programs with obscure-sounding names such as ISO 9000 and Total Quality
Management, has been one of the most important business trends of past decades.
But as once-bloated U.S. manufacturers have shaped up and become profitable
global competitors, the onus shifts to growth and innovation, especially in
today's idea-based, design-obsessed economy. While process excellence demands
precision, consistency, and repetition, innovation calls for variation,
failure, and serendipity.
Indeed, the very factors that make Six Sigma effective in one context can make
it ineffective in another. Traditionally, it uses rigorous statistical analysis
to produce unambiguous data that help produce better quality, lower costs, and
more efficiency. That all sounds great when you know what outcomes you'd like
to control. But what about when there are few facts to go onor you don't even
know the nature of the problem you're trying to define? "New things look very
bad on this scale," says MITSloan School of Management professor Eric von
Hippel, who has worked with 3M on innovation projects that he says "took a
backseat" once Six Sigma settled in. "The more you hardwire a company on total
quality management, [the more] it is going to hurt breakthrough innovation,"
adds Vijay Govindarajan, a management professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of
Business. "The mindset that is needed, the capabilities that are needed, the
metrics that are needed, the whole culture that is needed for discontinuous
innovation, are fundamentally different."
The exigencies of Wall Street are another matter. Investors liked McNerney's
approach to boosting earnings, which may have sacrificed creativity but made up
for it in consistency. Profits grew, on average, 22% a year. In Buckley's first
year, sales approached $23 billion and profits totaled $1.4 billion, but two
quarterly earnings misses and a languishing stock made it a rocky ride. In
2007, Buckley seems to have satisfied many skeptics on the Street, convincing
them he can ignite top-line growth without killing the McNerney-led
productivity improvements. Shares are up 12% since January.
Buckley's Street cred was hard-won. He's nowhere near the management rock star
his predecessor was. McNerney could play the President on TV. He's tall and
athletic, with charisma to spare. Buckley is of average height, with a slight
middle-age paunch, an informal demeanor, and a scientist's natural curiosity.
In the office he prefers checked shirts and khakis to suits and ties. He's
bookish and puckish, in the way of a tenured professor.
Buckley, in short, is just the kind of guy who has traditionally thrived at 3M.
It was one of the pillars of the "3M Way" that workers could seek out funding
from a number of company sources to get their pet projects off the ground.
Official company policy allowed employees to use 15% of their time to pursue
independent projects. The company explicitly encouraged risk and tolerated
failure. 3M's creative culture foreshadowed the one that is currently
celebrated unanimously at Google (GOOG
).
Perhaps all of that made it particularly painful for 3M's proud workforce to
deal with the hard reality the company faced by the late '90s. Profit and sales
growth were wildly erratic. It bungled operations in Asia amid the 1998
financial crisis there. The stock sat out the entire late '90s boom, budging
less than 1% from September, 1997, to September, 2000. The flexibility and lack
of structure, which had enabled the company's success, had also by then
produced a bloated staff and inefficient workflow. So McNerney had plenty of
cause to whip things into shape.
GREEN-BELT TRAINING REGIMEN
One of his main tools was Six Sigma, which originated at Motorola
(MOT ) in 1986 and became a staple of
corporate life in the '90s after it was embraced by GE. The term is now so
widely and divergently applied that it's hard to pin down what it actually
means. At some companies, Six Sigma is plainly a euphemism for cost-cutting.
Others explain it as a tool for analyzing a problem (high shipping costs, for
instance) and then using data to solve each component of it. But on a basic
level, Six Sigma seeks to remove variability from a process. In that way you
avoid errors, or defects, and increase predictability (technically speaking,
Six Sigma quality has come to be accepted as no more than 3.4 defects per
million).
At 3M, McNerney introduced the two main Six Sigma tools. The first and more
traditional version is an acronym known as DMAIC (pronounced "dee-may-ic"),
which stands for: define, measure, analyze, improve, control. These five steps
are the essence of the Six Sigma approach to problem solving. The other flavor
is called Design for Six Sigma, or DFSS, which purports to systematize a new
product development process so that something can be made to Six Sigma quality
from the start.
Thousands of 3Mers were trained as black belts, an honorific awarded to experts
who often act as internal consultants for their companies. Nearly every
employee participated in a several-day "green-belt" training regimen, which
explained DMAIC and DFSS, familiarized workers with statistics, and showed them
how to track data and create charts and tables on a computer program called
Minitab. The black belts fanned out and led bigger-scale "black-belt projects,"
such as increasing production speed 40% by reducing variations and removing
wasted steps from manufacturing. They also often oversaw smaller "green-belt
projects," such as improving the order fulfillment process. This Six Sigma
drive undoubtedly contributed to 3M's astronomical profitability improvements
under McNerney; operating margins went from 17% in 2001 to 23% in 2005.
While Six Sigma was invented as a way to improve quality, its main value to
corporations now clearly is its ability to save time and money. McNerney
arrived at a company that had been criticized for throwing cash at problems. In
his first full year, he slashed capital expenditures 22%, from $980 million to
$763 million, and 11% more to a trough of $677 million in 2003. As a percentage
of sales, capital expenditures dropped from 6.1% in 2001 to just 3.7% in 2003.
McNerney also held research and development funding constant from 2001 to 2005,
hovering over $1 billion a year. "If you take over a company that's been living
on innovation, clearly you can squeeze costs out," says Charles O'Reilly, a
Stanford Graduate School of Business management professor. "The question is,
what's the long-term damage to the company?"
Under McNerney, the R&D function at 3M was systematized in ways that were
unheard of and downright heretical in St. Paul, even though the guidelines
would have looked familiar at many other conglomerates. Some employees found
the constant analysis stifling. Steven Boyd, a PhD who had worked as a
researcher at 3M for 32 years before his job was eliminated in 2004, was one of
them. After a couple of months on a research project, he would have to fill in
a "red book" with scores of pages worth of charts and tables, analyzing
everything from the potential commercial application, to the size of the
market, to possible manufacturing concerns.
Traditionally, 3M had been a place where researchers had been given wide
latitude to pursue research down whatever alleys they wished. After the arrival
of the new boss, the DMAIC process was laid over a phase-review process for
innovationsa novelty at 3M. The goal was to speed up and systematize the
progress of inventions into the new-product pipeline. The DMAIC questions "are
all wonderful considerations, but are they appropriate for somebody who's just
trying to...develop some ideas?" asks Boyd. The impact of the Six Sigma regime,
according to Boyd and other former 3Mers, was that more predictable,
incremental work took precedence over blue-sky research. "You're supposed to be
having something that was going to be producing a profit, if not next quarter,
it better be the quarter after that," Boyd says.
For a long time, 3M had allowed researchers to spend years testing products.
Consider, for example, the Post-it note. Its inventor, Art Fry, a 3M scientist
who's now retired, and others fiddled with the idea for several years before
the product went into full production in 1980. Early during the Six Sigma
effort, after a meeting at which technical employees were briefed on the new
process, "we all came to the conclusion that there was no way in the world that
anything like a Post-it note would ever emerge from this new system," says
Michael Mucci, who worked at 3M for 27 years before his dismissal in 2004.
(Mucci has alleged in a class action that 3M engaged in age discrimination; the
company says the claims are without merit.)
There has been little formal research on whether the tension between Six Sigma
and innovation is inevitable. But the most notable attempt yet, by Wharton
School professor Mary Benner and Harvard Business School professor Michael L.
Tushman, suggests that Six Sigma will lead to more incremental innovation at
the expense of more blue-sky work. The two professors analyzed the types of
patents granted to paint and photography companies over a 20-year period,
before and after a quality improvement drive. Their work shows that, after the
quality push, patents issued based primarily on prior work made up a
dramatically larger share of the total, while those not based on prior work
dwindled.
Defenders of Six Sigma at 3M claim that a more systematic new-product
introduction process allows innovations to get to market faster. But Fry, the
Post-it note inventor, disagrees. In fact, he places the blame for 3M's recent
lack of innovative sizzle squarely on Six Sigma's application in 3M's research
labs. Innovation, he says, is "a numbers game. You have to go through 5,000 to
6,000 raw ideas to find one successful business." Six Sigma would ask, why not
eliminate all that waste and just come up with the right idea the first time?
That way of thinking, says Fry, can have serious side effects. "What's
remarkable is how fast a culture can be torn apart," says Fry, who lives in
Maplewood, Minn., just a few minutes south of the corporate campus and pops
into the office regularly to help with colleagues' projects. "[McNerney] didn't
kill it, because he wasn't here long enough. But if he had been here much
longer, I think he could have."
REINVIGORATED WORKFORCE
Buckley, a PhD chemical engineer by training, seems to recognize the cultural
ramifications of a process-focused program on an organization whose fate and
history is so bound up in inventing new stuff. "You cannot create in that
atmosphere of confinement or sameness," Buckley says. "Perhaps one of the
mistakes that we made as a companyit's one of the dangers of Six Sigmais that
when you value sameness more than you value creativity, I think you potentially
undermine the heart and soul of a company like 3M."
In recent years, the company's reputation as an innovator has been sliding. In
2004, 3M was ranked No. 1 on Boston Consulting Group's Most Innovative
Companies list (now the BusinessWeek/BCG list). It dropped to No. 2 in 2005, to
No. 3 in 2006, and down to No. 7 this year. "People have kind of forgotten
about these guys," says Dev Patnaik, managing associate of innovation
consultancy Jump Associates. "When was the last time you saw something
innovative or experimental coming out of there?"
Buckley has loosened the reins a bit by removing 3M research scientists'
obligation to hew to Six Sigma objectives. There was perhaps a
one-size-fits-all approach to the application of Six Sigma as the initial
implementation got under way, says Dr. Larry Wendling, a vice-president who
directs the "R" in 3M's R&D operation. "Since [McNerney] was driving it to
the organization, you know, there were metrics established across the
organization and quite frankly, some of them did not make as much sense for the
lab as they did other parts of the organization," Wendling says. What sort of
metrics? Keeping track of how many black-belt and green-belt projects were
completed, for one.
In fact, it's not uncommon for Six Sigma to become an end unto itself. That may
be appropriate in an operations contextat the end of the year, it's easy
enough for a line manager to count up all the money he's saved by doing
green-belt projects. But what 3Mers came to realize is that these financially
definitive outcomes were much more elusive in the context of a research lab.
"In some cases in the lab it made sense, but in other cases, people were going
around dreaming up green-belt programs to fill their quota of green-belt
programs for that time period," says Wendling. "We were letting, I think, the
process get in the way of doing the actual invention."
To help get the creative juices flowing, Buckley is opening the money
spigothiking spending on R&D, acquisitions, and capital expenditures. The
overall R&D budget will grow 20% this year, to $1.5 billion. Even more
significant than the increase in money is Buckley's reallocation of those
funds. He's funneling cash into what he calls "core" areas of 3M technology, 45
in all, from abrasives to nanotechnology to flexible electronics. That is
another departure from McNerney's priorities; he told BusinessWeek in 2004 that
the 3M product with the most promise was skin-care cream Aldara, the
centerpiece to a burgeoning pharmaceuticals business. In January, Buckley sold
the pharma business for $2 billion.
Quietly, the McNerney legacy is being revised at 3M. While there is no doubt
the former CEO brought some positive change to the company, many workers say
they are reinvigorated now that the corporate emphasis has shifted from
profitability and process discipline to growth and innovation. Timm Hammond,
the director of strategic business development, says "[Buckley] has brought
back a spark around creativity." Adds Bob Anderson, a business director in 3M's
radio frequency identification division: "We feel like we can dream again."
