My colleagues often tell me that there is no real difference between Six Sigma and TQM. "Show me where Six Sigma involves anything new." Six Sigma employs some of the same tried-and-true tools and techniques of TQM. Both Six Sigma and TQM emphasize the importance of top-down support and leadership. Both approaches make it clear that continuous improvement of quality is critical to long-term business success. The PDSA cycle used in TQM is not fundamentally different than the Six Sigma DMAIC cycle.

But there are differences. Critical differences. And these differences explain why the popularity of TQM has waned, while Six Sigma's popularity continues to grow.

The difference, in a word, is management. TQM provided only very broad guidelines for management to follow. Guidelines so abstract and general that only the most gifted leaders were able to knit together a successful deployment strategy for TQM. Business magazines and newspapers reported widespread failure of TQM efforts. True, solid research showed that organizations which succeeded in successfully implementing TQM reaped substantial rewards. But the low probability of success deterred many organizations from trying TQM. Instead, many organizations opted for ISO 9000. ISO 9000 promises not world-class performance levels, but "standard" performance. But it provides clear criteria and a guarantee that meeting these criteria will result in recognition. In contrast, TQM offered a mushy set of philosophical guidelines and no way to prove that one had accomplished their quality goals.

Unlike TQM, Six Sigma was not developed by techies who only dabbled in management. Six Sigma was created by some of America's most gifted CEOs. People like Motorola's Bob Galvin, AlliedSignal's Larry Bossidy, and GE's Jack Welch. These people had a single goal in mind: to make their businesses as successful as possible. Once they were convinced that the tools and techniques of the quality profession could help them do this, they developed a framework to make it happen. Six Sigma.

Speaking as a member of the quality profession, we knew that we had a winning set of tools that could solve quality problems in manufacturing. Total quality control, invented in 1950, showed that product quality could be improved by expanding quality efforts into upstream areas such as engineering and purchasing. We even had limited success in using our tools to improve quality in administrative areas by reducing errors in service transactions. But despite these successes we suffered from a number of shortcomings. For example:

q      We focused on quality and ignored other critical business issues. Quality trumped everything else. Of course, this made no business sense and often lead to organizations that failed despite improved quality.

q      We created a quality specialty that suffered from all of the same suboptimization problems as other functions within the organization. Despite all of our talk about a systems perspective, when push came to shove we fought for our point of view (and our budget) just like everyone else. In the typical organization this resulted in other departments considering "quality" to be the turf of the quality department. Thus, they backed off of梠r never started梕fforts of their

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