Six Sigma

In The Man Who Broke Capitalism, Six Sigma appears as the Welch-era management system that Jack Welch’s protégé Jim McNerney carried into 3M and then Boeing. The book describes it as inspired by the Japanese notion of kaizen (continuous improvement), using “a complex system of feedback and buzzwords to try and root out any lingering vestiges of inefficiency” — and notes that whether it actually helped or just generated paperwork was “a subject of fierce debate.”

The book’s narrative treats Six Sigma as the opposing force to genuine innovation. At 3M, McNerney was “accused of stifling innovation by imposing Six Sigma and cutting costs”; when he left, the company reverted to its “old, eccentric ways,” with CEO George Buckley saying the quiet part out loud — “You can’t put a Six Sigma process into [invention]… That’s not how creativity works.” When McNerney took over Boeing in 2005, the book recounts him making “similar moves,” displacing Boeing’s transparency-driven engineering culture with cost-cutting discipline. Six Sigma thus functions in the wiki as a marker of the Financialization thesis — process and efficiency optimization crowding out the messy, expensive work of building things well.

Context: Six Sigma is a data-driven quality-management methodology popularized at Motorola in the 1980s and famously scaled at GE under Jack Welch in the 1990s, aiming to reduce process defects to roughly 3.4 per million opportunities.

Where this appears

• The Man Who Broke Capitalism — Welch-era management system McNerney imposed at 3M and Boeing, framed as the antithesis of innovation and a tool of cost-cutting.