List $27.50

Written by Mikel J. Harry & Richard Schroeder - Narrated by James Lurie - Abridged Nonfiction - 4 CASSETTES - 5 hours

Publisher, Bantam Doubleday Dell (December 1999)

SIX SIGMA is the most powerful breakthrough management tool ever devised, promising increased market share, cost reductions and dramatic improvements in bottom-line profitability for companies of any size. The darling of Wall Street, it has become the mantra of Fortune 500 boardrooms around the world because it works.

What is SIX SIGMA? It is first and foremost a business process that enables companies to increase profits dramatically by streamlining operations, improving quality, and eliminating defects or mistakes in everything a company does. While traditional quality programs have focused on detecting and correcting defects, Six Sigma encompasses something broader: It provides specific methods to re-create the process itself so that defects are never produced in the first place. This is the reason Wall Street and corporations as diverse as Allied Signal, Honda, Maytag, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, Canon Hitachi, Lockheed Martin, American Express, Toshiba, Du Pont, and Polaroid have embarked on corporate wide SIX SIGMA programs.

"Six Sigma is the most important initiative GE has ever undertaken--it is part of the genetic code of our future leadership." --Jack Welch, CEO, GE

"We've taken the difficult but basic Six Sigma skill of reducing defects and applied it to every business process, from inventing and commercializing a new product all the way to billing and collections after the product is delivered. Just as we think we've generated the last dollar of profit out of a business, we uncover new ways to harvest cash as we reduce cycle times, lower inventories, increase output, and reduce scrap. The results are better and more competitively priced products, more satisfied customers who give us more business, and improved cash flow." --Larry Bossidy, CEO, AlliedSignal

"The Six Sigma Breakthrough Strategy gives new structure to the tools we already had. Structure has been the key element missing in Polaroid's drive for quality. I keep telling my people that the Breakthrough Strategy cookbook tells us how to use time-tested ingredients in new ways--For us, the results from the Breakthrough Strategy have been quick and powerful." --Mike Hart, Black Belt engineer, Polaroid

"Mikel Harry's innovation of Breakthrough Strategy has taken quality into America's boardrooms. While Dr. Deming's theory of profound knowledge built management awareness and Dr. Juran's trilogy helped to establish the foundation of a solid quality 'science,' Dr. Harry has demonstrated how to make theory become practice at companies like Motorola, ABB, AlliedSignal, and GE." --Gregory Watson, President, American Society for Quality --This text refers to the hardcover edition of this title

About the Authors: MIKEL HARRY is the cofounder and chief executive of the Six Sigma Academy, Inc. He was one of the original architects of Six Sigma while working at Motorola in the 1980s. He later served as Corporate Vice President at Asea Brown Boveri Ltd. He received his B.S. and M.A. in electronic from Ball State University and Ph.D. at Arizona State University. HARRY lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. RICHARD SCHROEDER is the co-founder and president of Six Sigma Academy, Inc. A former Vice President at Motorola, he joined Mikel Harry in creating the Six Sigma Academy in 1996. SCHROEDER lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.