Of the Six Sigma books I've read, this is the one I'd recommend most highly. It will give you the basic "tools" of Six Sigma in a compact, useable form. I feel that this would be an excellent text for corporate training on Six Sigma, certainly for an introductory course.
A quick read of the reviews on Amazon will give you a feel for why people are skeptical of 6 Sigma: the feel-good tone of most writing on 6 Sigma and the insistence that it "is not a flavor-of-the-month management trend" make many of us suspect that 6 Sigma is not much more than hollow jargon and acronyms.
Lets accept that these criticisms are valid and further that many "practitioners" are just self-aggrandizing or worse. But that still leaves us with the essential difficulties of positive change in any organization: you need to overcome assumptions that your organization's subculture may not even realize it has. What a corporation does by accepting Six Sigma is that it empowers people to gather data to challenge what "everybody knows". Most importantly, it sets a very high quality standard, which reinforces the sanctioning of data-driven change.
The authors of "What is Six Sigma" put it very well early on: "proactive management means making habits out of what are, too often, neglected business practices: defining ambitious goals and reviewing them frequently, setting clear priorities, focusing on problem prevention rather than firefighting, and questioning why we do things instead of blindly defending them."
I feel that the greatest flaw in Six Sigma is that many practitioners and even the books permit the basics to be lost in the shuffle. If one listens to people talk about Six Sigma, its easy to forget that a critical part of Six Sigma is that the data comes first, not the solution. I often hear co-workers say "we need to finish this project to improve our six sigmas" or "if we could get rid of this server we'll all get our green belts".
The term Six Sigma is derived from statistics and many books gloss over the statistics and move right on to basic project management techniques or how to overcome objections to Six Sigma. This book gives a clear and brief explanation of how to calculate standard deviations and includes a handy table to help with determine "sigma levels". Every Six Sigma book should respond to the challenge raised by this book and also include this information in the first 10 pages.
Finally, I recommend this book because it is concise and to-the-point. I feel that the fluff and/or Machiavellian advice in many of the other books just feed into people's healthy skepticism and distract people from the beauty of Six Sigma: the challenge to strive for near-perfect quality and the sanction to use statistics to cut through the inertia in our work lives.
I would also recommend Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" (ISBN 0393057658) as a companion book. Lewis (author of "Liar's Poker") uses Wall Street trading as an analogy to explain why the Oakland As baseball team is one of the successful teams with much less money than most. But I also see an analogy relevant to the topic of Six Sigma. "Moneyball" shows how one can achieve superior results by testing what everyone thinks they know with fact gathering and rigorous analyses. Moneyball and "What is Six Sigma" may prove to be an inspiring combination.
