Repent of your wicked ways O fellow Six Sigma Heretics, or surely you shall be smitten (smoted? smited? smartied?) and turned into a pillar of out-of-spec material! The End (of the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks countdown, anyway) is here! What could possibly be the No. 1 reason that Six Sigma fails? Can you guess? Is your business doing it? Is mine? I can hardly wait to find out!

As we have discussed over these few months, there are a lot of ways Six Sigma, whatever that is, can fail (see my first article for that discussion). Some may be obvious in retrospect, others perhaps more subtle, but there are many pitfalls on the way to Six Sigma enlightenment, and I have humbly tried to warn you about a few.

However, there is one way that stands out above the rest. One mistake so fundamental, yet so common, that for me it’s the No. 1 way to spend a lot of time and money and get grey hairs with nothing to show for it but a business that’s worse off than when you started.

So I will tell you…

 …