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Six Sigma -- Fads

Businesses were bombarded with an array of management fads in the 1980s and 1990s.

Benchmarking * Best Practices * Customer Focused * Value Creation * Core Competence * Quality Circles * Strategic Alliances * Concurrent Engineering * Rightsizing * Reengineering * Business Process Redesign * Intrapreneurs

While there is no standard definition of what constitutes a management fad, faddish ideas tend to be simple, prescriptive and transient. They are adopted widely by companies but quickly fall from favour when the hoped-for benefits fail to emerge. 1

Six Sigma is one of those initiatives that if implemented incorrectly becomes just another fad, according to Steve Walton, Associate Professor in the Practice of Decision & Information Analysis at the Goizueta Business School of Emory University.

Robert E. Cole, professor of organizational behavior at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley concluded that managerial fads can be beneficial. "The most effective companies figure out ways to build cumulative knowledge based on successive managerial fads."2

The average life cycle of a theory of management is five years... according to a study of management theories by graduate student Leonard Ponzi and Prof. Michael Koening at Long Island University.

To realize the value of the method requires continual effort, discipline, resources and skills to implement and follow through. Even the most useful management system can die because "many managers and most corporations are satisfied to just get along and do a reasonable job without straining for excellence," says Ronald Burke, professor of organizational behaviour at York University's Schulich School of Business.

Spot a fad

  1. It is simple and makes claims to easily solve complex problems
  2. It claims to apply to and help everyone
  3. It is not anchored or related to any known and generally accepted theory.
  4. Its creators hesitate to present it in academic settings and refuse to write about it in refereed journals.
  5. Its proponents cannot tell you exactly how it works.
  6. It's a session in nearly all the conferences you attend.
  7. Proponents claim it has changed their lives and it can change yours too.
  8. It is just too good to be true. 3

For more on fads in management:

Work911 Workplace Supersite created by Bacal & Associates

Management and Myths by Adrian Furnham

Beyond the Hype by Robert G. Eccles and Nitin Nohria

Management Redeemed by Frederick G. Hilmer and Lex Donaldson

Special Edition of McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy in Crisis, Issue 2, 2002

1 London, Simon. "Why are the fads fading away?" Financial Times, 12 June 2003, 14.

2 Rifkin, Glenn. "When Is a Fad Not a Fad?" Harvard Business Review, 72:5 (1994):11.

3 Immen, Wallace. "Fads we love to hate." The Globe and Mail, 13 February 2004, C1.

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