May 2002
Volume 1 • Number 3

Contents

Six Sigma Pioneers

In the Beginning

Robert W. Galvin talks about how Motorola started Six Sigma and helped spread its success.
By A. Blanton Godfrey, editor

Robert W. Galvin, currently chair of the executive committee of Motorola Inc., was chair and CEO of the company in the mid-1980s when it launched its Six Sigma Quality program. A few years later Motorola became the first large company to win the United States’ Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. His leadership and experiences with quality and the beginnings of Six Sigma provide insights for Six Sigma practitioners and organizations today.

Q: Could you please comment on how Six Sigma started at Motorola?
A: Before we had even thought of Six Sigma, we were having an officers’ meeting. Art Sundy, head of all sales and marketing and assistant general manager of our two-way radio business, stated, “Our quality stinks.”

In this business we had 85% of the world’s market share and were getting double digit growth. All the other officers and I took Sundy seriously. We decided we were going to use our common sense and do everything we could to improve our quality. We did this for one or two years, and good things happened gradually.

Sometime later Bill Smith, another executive with our two-way radio business, called me asking for an appointment. He came to my office and explained the theory of latent defects. I called him back the next day to try to better understand what he was talking about. He soon became a sophisticated advisor in applying statistical methods to improve quality.

We quickly learned if we could control variation, we could get all the parts and processes to work and get to an end result of 3.4 defects per million opportunities, or a six sigma level. Our people coined the term and it stuck. It was shorthand for people to understand that if you can control the variation, you can achieve remarkable results.

Q: Why were you so intent on improving quality?
A: Our customers did not like what we were doing for them. We decided we had better please the customer. We had plenty of intelligence from many sources about this—our salespeople, our design engineers and others. We elevated our listening and took customers very seriously. We reduced our arrogance.

Q: What do you believe you did best in leading this initiative within Motorola?
A: I listened. Our people knew they could say anything in front of me. I speculate that in other companies, Sundry might not have had the courage to stand up in front of 175 people in a public meeting and say the quality in the company stinks. He knew he could stand up in front of his cronies at Motorola and say this. I believe we had created an atmosphere where people could speak and influence the company. If I learned enough from experts, I could react and have a useful impact on what we were doing.

In about 1985 we realized we had acquired relatively sophisticated data, and if we could synthesize it and present it to the top groups in the company and the policy committee, we could make great progress. Jack Germaine became our head facilitator for quality.

At that time we had regular management (operating) committee and policy committee meetings, and we sandwiched a special meeting in between to focus on quality. I did not go to the operating and policy committee meetings but waited with Germaine to be called in for the quality meeting. They would always run out of time.

Germaine and I tolerated this for a while. Then one day I made quality the first topic in the morning and said we would take as long as we needed—all day if necessary. After that there was no need for the operating committee meeting: I told the committee members that quality would be the first thing on every agenda, including our board meetings. By the end of the week everyone knew I had quality first on the agenda. I preached but in a manner that people accepted.

Q: What was the hardest part of going from good intentions to getting results?
A: The hardest part was that the acceptance level among any 10 people always varied. A third would buy in, another third would say they would get to it later, and the last third would say, “I’m already as good as I can be.” Some would not invest their time.

We did an awful lot of show and tell and talked about the good things we were doing and what we might learn from them. For example, “What could I take out and transfer into my department?” We let each organization have time to tell what its people were doing.

The members of our patent department—a very important department for us—believed they were already performing well, so they did not invest time in the quality initiative at all. I let them make their own bed. So the guy in charge of the department was never called on at the meetings. After six or nine months it became embarrassing.

He went back to his department and challenged his staff. A couple of people decided to map the invention process for applying for and obtaining a patent. They decided if the process were perfect, they could get a patent in 36 hours. By examining the process, they believed they could double the number of patents we obtained with the same staff.

Mapping the process is critical. The patent people had been taking so much time for each step, they discovered all kinds of things that could be eliminated. Now the manager realized he had something to talk about. When his staff looked at an idealized system, it required only 36 hours vs. what used to take months and months. They were able to cut the actual process time by 50%.

When we looked at auditing we found the same thing. When we finally took the time to map the process steps in detail, we were able to change from eight months to eight weeks to eight days—all in the guise of quality and making operations more efficient.

Q: Why did you decide to have Motorola pursue the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award?
A: Sheer coincidence. We had never heard of it until around 1987, when it was created. We read about it in the Chicago Tribune. At lunch four of us were chatting informally about it. There was a prize, and the specifications for getting the prize were solid. We believed we could do all those things. We believed we might be the only company in the country who had been working for this prize without knowing there was an award.

Q: How did winning the Baldrige Award help Motorola as a company?
A: Oh, it helped us immensely with our customers. There were some slow spots in the economy then, and we would go to our customers and tell them they should reduce their number of suppliers and buy more from Motorola. We were building a reputation for dependability and quality.

We had started Motorola University to teach our people Six Sigma and other ways to improve quality. We followed the requirements of the Baldrige Award to share our methods. Nine out of 10 of our executives said, “Well, this is nice, but we shouldn’t give our secrets away.”

But I saw a tremendous opportunity. We could see our customers for a whole day rather than 10 or 15 minutes. This would be a phenomenal selling opportunity.

So when people came to me and asked how we won the Baldrige Award, I told them we would have a class and tell them—if they would send their big league people. From 1988 until 1995 we had a strong rotation of people coming through these classes. I met with many of them personally and gave 40 or 45 minute talks. There would be three or four CEOs in these classes I knew personally. I would tell them if they were not going to invest their personal time in quality improvement, then forget it. I told them whatever business they were in should be done perfectly anyway.

Q: Why did you agree to share so much of what you had done with General Electric, AlliedSignal (now Honeywell) and others?
A: When we offered to talk about these principles to the top people, we decided we would tell any of our competitors anything about our quality system because they would also be our suppliers and our customers.

Q: What do you think GE, AlliedSignal and others have added to the Six Sigma process?
A: At a given window of time they may have had a more sustained energy in the process. Maybe it is the nature of things: We probably didn’t sustain the day-to-day energies of the new companies in the game. Maybe by 1995 we weren’t pushing it as hard as they were. They were on the upswing of momentum.

Q: Why do you think Six Sigma has become so prevalent in U.S. business in the past few years?
A: It is just common sense. It sounds so complicated at first, but you can explain it to anyone. If we can make every part identical, we can make things so much better. We have people on the production line who see that if they can keep their work within the range of quality, everything works. They say, “Wow, I can understand statistics!” Remarkable. Sophisticated. Commonsense.

Q: Why did you agree to co-chair the national initiative on quality in healthcare (Pursuing Perfection: Raising the Bar in Healthcare Performance)?
A: It was apparent healthcare for most of us had some weaknesses. By coincidence I had sought to help the scientific community, including the national academies, and had some influence on how they did their sophisticated work.

The facts of the poor quality of healthcare were understood in essence by open-minded thinkers, such as the leaders of the Institute of Medicine. They were called upon by Congress to run a study and come up with a statistical picture of the state of quality in American hospitals.

I began to understand the facts and what could be done. Michael Wood, M.D., from the Mayo Clinic called and said they were going to do something. The Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser Permanente and others really intended to do something serious. It became obvious these organizations were interested in being effective.

So I said, since you don’t know what to do next and you need to know the steps to improve quality, I will give you the Motorola University course free, but you have to show up, sit through the whole thing and send people from your institutions. The leaders also had to personally come. We gave them a three-day course. We promised that by the end of the three days they would know many practical things they could do to improve quality day by day.

Q: How did you create the university challenge in which some of our leading companies so generously shared their quality methods with selected universities?
A: My challenge was actually to university presidents and deans of engineering and business schools during a meeting in Cincinnati. I challenged them to bring 50 professors from their faculties to Motorola University, and we would teach them about quality. But they would have to assure me they would teach what they learned in their own classrooms.

I was sure none of them would accept, but they all came up after I spoke and said they would come. So many people wanted the course, I decided Motorola could not do it all, so I asked some other companies to help. AT&T, Proctor & Gamble, IBM and Milliken & Co. all agreed to sponsor one or two universities.

We did Purdue University first and are still working with them; I just attended the 10th anniversary of that program. The head of Purdue ate this up and was a real general in leading this effort.

The Milliken resources were the best—even better than AT&T. They were always superb.

Editor’s note: For more comments from Robert Galvin, please see the “Final Thoughts” column.

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