The city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, used to be typical of a lot of Rust Belt cities: too many boarded-up buildings, insufficient infrastructure, a 37-percent population drop over 50 years, and a flagging downtown area that was in desperate need of revitalization.

That all changed in 2000, when the city’s mayor, Graham Richard, took the reins of the municipality. Soon after he was sworn into office, Richard, a former Indiana state senator and co-founder of the TQM Network, moved to deploy Six Sigma to measure the city services most in need of improvement. He established an executive council that served as the city’s deployment team, and created the position of quality enhancement manager, appointing the city’s first Black Belt to fill it. Subsequently, five more city employees completed Black Belt training, and Green Belt classes were widely attended by department managers.

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