Today I received a sales call from a person interested in becoming a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. He had what I call a "can't do" personality. This is the diametric opposite of the "can do" person. This type of individual looks for reasons why a particular thing can't be done. How about a project in the sales department? No way, sales people won't go for it, sales isn't a process anyway, management won't let us touch the sales area, and so on.

Successful change agents are invariably can-do people. To be sure they spend a lot of time planning to avoid obstacles, but when they encounter the inevitable obstacle, they don't shrink from the challenge. They find ways over, under, around, or through the obstacle. They won't be stopped. They are relentless pursuers of change.

I once had the opportunity to work with a major aerospace client to study the success factors for their Six Sigma Black Belts. We reviewed the histories of a number of Black Belts who had success levels that varied from poor to excellent.

After coming up with a list of the factors that seemed to have an effect on success, we went through an exercise to determine the importance weights. Using the Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP) the Six Sigma Champion, Master Black Belts, and I came up with the weights shown in figure 1.

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