About Walter McIntyre

I live in Buford, GA, with my wife. Please check out my website, leanmeanprocessimprovemnt.com. I am the author of "Lean and Mean Process Improvement".

Thanksgiving Notes

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Walter McIntyre

This will not be a post about Six Sigma or personal development. It is a time for being thankful and telling those you love how you feel.

Things I am thankful for and people I care about:

My mother and her recovery from cancer surgery.
My wife who deserves recognition for putting up with me.
My grandson Caleb who brings light into every corner of my life.
My son and the difference his life makes with others.
My daughter-in-law whom I love as if she were my own daughter.
My job and the opportunities it gives me.
My friends. Special mention: Lonnie who gave me a job, Brian and Fadi who share my burden at work.
My readers, who follow my words agree or not.

The problem is that when making a list you will undoubtably leave someone or something off by mistake. If I left anyone out, please do not take offense. I am only a human man, flawed, but saved by Grace.

Talent vs Heart

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Walter McIntyre

If you follow professional football you are hearing a lot about Tim Tebow’s perceived lack of passing talent. Even so, he continues to win. So what’s up with that? If you look deeper into the story, you will find that his teammates believe in his leadership and drive, even if his head coach and the sports news talking heads do not.

Obviously, there is something else in play here. Let me explain. Talent by itself is like a box cake mix. Until you add some water and eggs, you have nothing of value. Talent without heart and drive will not win a championship for you. After coaching high school basketball for several years I found that teams who relied on their talent for success were the easiest to beat.

Success comes more from effort than talent. Yes, talent is an important ingredient to success, but it is just an ingredient. The plain truth is that there are many people with talent who are wasting away with sub-par performance because of a lack of effort. At the same time, there are people who are less talented, but because of their effort they accomplish great things.

Let me give you some exciting information. Your success depends on your effort. Sure, talent helps but effort is what carries you to the top. You can go as far in life as your effort will take you. There is no magic, no silver bullet, or short cut to success. It is all up to you. My dad used to tell me that in order to win I had to out work the competition. I have found this to be as true in business as it is in athletics.

So, put on your game face and get busy. Plan to out work and out effort the competition. Success is a choice you make, not something that just happens to you.

Personal Development and Six Sigma

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Walter McIntyre

You might ask why I write about personal development on a website that is supposed to be focused on Six Sigma. This is a question that I hear from those who are trained in Six Sigma, but I rarely hear by those who are not.

The answer is that I see Six Sigma as a paradigm change for business people, not a just statistical business management program. At the end of the day, businesses are operated and managed by people. Any real change in the way things are done will happen at the people level. Failure to understand statistics will not cause a business to fail. Failure to understand the underlying, people focused reasons for why things happen in a business will lead to failure. The “why” is more important than the “what”.
Let me give an example. Business arrogance will cause a business to have a deaf ear toward customers and employees even if the business metrics show a problem. Six Sigma processes and statistics will not solve the problem of a manager who is not a believer or is protecting their turf. Therefore, a paradigm change at the individual manager level has to take place in order to bring business processes in alignment with customer expectations.

The majority of Six Sigma consultants are probably aware of the importance of existing corporate culture and its ability to adapt to the Six Sigma paradigm. At the same time, they probably do not know how to fix the problem and (or) are unwilling to walk away from the job opportunity. The resulting Six Sigma roll out fails because of failure to change the leadership culture. No one is happy as a result.

From a cultural perspective, the change is from the inside out not the outside in. No consultant can push change in an organization. Change is pulled. The impetus of pushed change comes from desire that is outside the organization. The impetus for pulled changes comes from the organization’s internal desire to change. This is where the rubber meets the road in Six Sigma.

Circle of Influence

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Walter McIntyre

The concept of a circle of influence has been around for a while. For me, Stephen Covey’s description was the most influential. Just in case some of my readers have not had much thought time with the concept, your circle of influence incorporates those people, organizations and circumstances you are able to influence in some way.

Each of us, as individuals, or even as a business/organization, has some control over expanding or contracting our circle of influence. Obviously, for growth to take place, the expansion of your circle of influence is important, as long as it is for the right reasons.

Breaking things down to a simplistic philosophical level, I see four sets of opposing forces at work. Each set is made up of a quality that will expand your circle of influence and a quality that will contract it. These are:

Self-honesty/Self-deceit
Reality centered/Self-centered
Self-confidence/ Self-doubt
Self-Esteem/Self-condescension

Bear in mind that balance is important in any relationship and the same is true here. Going too far in the direction of self-honesty, for example, can be as bad for you as practicing self-deceit. Our wishes and dreams are not always in the realm of reality, but can still be used to give direction and motivation to our lives.

Being honest with yourself is critical for any forward progress with your personal life. If you consider a business/organization a self-contained entity, the same relationship to forward progress applies. Being honest with yourself allows you to make quality decisions based upon facts and the truth. The fear of the facts, or the truth, is a sign of deception and untrustworthiness that will contract your circle of influence. No matter how hard you try to hide it, others can see right through you.

Being reality centered means realizing that you are very seldom at the center of the universe, as a person or as a business/organization. Actually, in the human experience, the center of universe changes along with circumstances and priorities. When others see a reality base perspective about what is important, your circle of influence grows because trust and confidence in your opinions and perspectives grows. When others see a consistent self-centered perspective, your circle of influence shrinks along with trust in your opinions and perspectives.

It is difficult to make quality decisions when you doubt yourself. Whereas it is prudent to evaluate your abilities in specific circumstances, to always doubt yourself is not. Just think of how the world would be different if people like Edison or Einstein let self-doubt prevent them from making bold statements and decisions. On the other hand, being over confident has its own problems. People want to be lead either directly or indirectly, so they pay more attention to self-confident people and pity those lost in self-doubt. Your circle of influence expands with self-confidence until the tipping point of arrogance is reached.

I consider self-esteem to be one of the most important of human perspectives. It is the firewall that allows you to operate interdependently with others in our social network. When self-esteem is healthy, you are not nearly as dependent on other people’s opinion or criticisms of you. When self-esteem is low (self-condescending), your voice joins other voices in criticizing and bullying you. The resiliency that comes with good self-esteem expands your circle of influence because others appreciate your emotional strength and stability.

All of this can be state in a unified way. Being honest, confident, grounded and emotionally strong will expend you circle of influence. This expansion results in more opportunity on multiple levels.

Productivity Myth

Posted on October 23, 2011 by Walter McIntyre

We hear a lot about productivity these days and it’s impact on being competitive. I believe this to be a mistaken relationship. Or better stated, an incomplete relationship. I am not saying that productivity is not important. It is just that production is only half of the equation. The other half is production control.

Production and production control are balanced against each other. The idea is to produce products and services to a production control target. For example, a business can say they need to produce 100 units per hour, or they can say they need to produce 100 units per hour that meet 100% of the targeted customer critical to quality specifications.

The result is that you may take a production line that can produce 200 units per hour if quality is not a concern, and tune it to produce 100 units per hour with no waste, rework or negative customer impact. I know what you are saying here. “My productivity is half of what it was and my costs are higher.”

Is this really the case? Out of the 200 units originally produced, how many met customer specifications? How many of the 200 units had to be scrapped or reworked? How many inspectors, rework, and scrap removal dollars have been spent? How much market share did you lose because customer expectations were not met? The lack of quality will never save you money. It will always cost you more.

The trick to staying viable in a difficult economy is to remember that shoppers buy based upon perceived quality. Especially when their financial resources are limited. No one wants to waste their money on a cheap, but ineffective, purchase.

The way to business success is by managing both production and production control. That is, to measure a process’s production capability by its ability to produce “at quality”. This enables a business to make capital and human investment decisions based upon a process’s true “customer” capability.

Avoid Being a Commodity in the Sales World

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Walter McIntyre

According to Wikipedia:
“A commodity is a good (product)…. which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market…. the market treats it as equivalent, or nearly so, no matter who produces it….one of the characteristics of a commodity good is that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole.”

As you drive along looking for gasoline, and you see multiple gas stations, how do you choose which service to use? Most people chose the least expensive, thereby treating gasoline as a commodity. Quality is considered equal across the suppliers and, as a result, is not a part of the shopper’s decision making process.
No matter what you are selling, you don’t want your product or service to be treated like a commodity. Without differentiation, you are like driftwood and have no control over your sales. Product or service differentiation is what gives you control over the market.

The best way to differentiate yourself, and what you are selling, is to begin with the awareness that the shopper is looking for a solution, not a price. The shopper cannot evaluate prices without first understanding the solution options.

Consider the game show “The Price is Right”. A contestant has to choose between Door Number 1 or Door Number 2, without knowing what is behind the doors. The decision is a hard one if the only thing you have to work with is price. This is why it is not a good idea to start any sales pitch with price. You are forcing the shopper to think commodity.

When you start by trying to understand the need and present a solution that fits that need, the shopper is now focused on differentiation. What you are trying to get to is relevancy. When the shopper can say “yes” to what you are saying (even if silently in their mind) you are moving toward a closing opportunity because you are in tune with them.

Next, understand that the solution and the price are related. Once the solution options are understood, the price becomes relevant. For example, if I say that I can sell you a calculator for $100.00, your first question is what kind of calculator is it and what can it do. You are not in a closing situation. If I tell you that I can sell you a calculator that can evaluate and trade stocks with a single key stroke based upon an algorithm used by Warren Buffet, and it only costs $100.00, you are in a closing situation.

Here is the formula to avoid being a commodity. Find out what the shopper needs, offer them a solution that fits their need, then price the solution accordingly. Always be pricing is a bad strategy. Always be closing is a good strategy.

Six Sigma and Business Acumen

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Walter McIntyre

A common mantra in Six Sigma is to “make decisions based on data”. This is a flawed strategy that probably comes from Six Sigma’s dependence on statistical experts instead of business experts. A Six Sigma Black Belt or Master Black Belt is only as good as their business leadership skills. This is why a form test for Six Sigma certification will not work. A form test cannot measure leadership skills or business acumen. You need the full package to be effective. This is why so many Six Sigma initiatives fail. There is too much emphasis on math skills and not enough on business acumen and leadership.

Good business decisions take both data and business acumen. Data by itself can tell you what is happening, if you have measured the right things. Business acumen will enable you to measure the right things and help you to understand the “why” behind the data. Business leadership is used to lead change.
There is also the question of significance. Data can tell you statistical significance, but business acumen is required to understand practical significance. For example, a process change can produce a statistical significant shift in a product or service that is insignificant to the customer or business from a practical point of view.

To continue to be relevant to the business world, Six Sigma will have to become more business acumen and leadership focused.

You Are What You Expect

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Walter McIntyre

What you expect from others becomes the minimum you will accept from others.

There are certain aspects of human nature that are predictable and usable by marketers. These behaviors occur whether we are aware of them or not. One of these is shopper/customer expectation behavior. When we tell a sales person what we expect, we are really telling them the minimum acceptable performance required for us to buy. In Six Sigma this becomes a critical to quality concern.

Whether you are in sales, Six Sigma or a relationship, knowing the expectations of the other party allows you to know the minimum level of performance expected. People who operate at or below this expected level are probably going to fail.

If you what to succeed in business and have quality relationships, exceeding expectations should be your goal. In life, we cannot always control our circumstances, but we can always control our effort.

What you expect from yourself becomes the maximum effort you will put forth.

A few years back, when the Orlando Magic played the Houston Rockets for the NBA championship, the series was a blow out. The Magic had a great season and talked consistently about “playing for the championship”. They accomplished that goal, which seemed to be the target of their season. The problem is that they played poorly in the championship series and were embarrassed by being swept. They met their expectations and could go no further.

This is another one of those unconscious behaviors mentioned above. When you set expectations for yourself, you have also set a target for your effort. This is why you should not set your expectations too low, or unreasonably high. Goal setting is a progressive thing. The healthy pattern is to set expectations that you know will change once you reach them. The satisfied person is also a stationary or static person. Becoming satisfied will stop your forward momentum.

Look at it from the good, better, best approach. If you believe that “good” is good enough, you are a minimalist and failure will plague you. If you think in the better category, that just makes you average, and though you have a somewhat higher probability of success, true excellence escapes you. When you think in the best category, you have the highest probability of success and excellence comes to define your efforts.

Fearless Moral Inventory

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Walter McIntyre

Belief System

What do you believe? This is not an easy question to answer. We are complicated beings living in a complicated world. With that in mind, let’s make the answer easier to get by being honest with ourselves. A fearless moral inventory will only be useful if it is based in reality and honesty.

A good question to start with is who owns your beliefs? Did you come to them by means of your own intellect and life experiences or were they given to you by your family, boss or some other significant person in your life. If your belief system belongs to someone else, you are living someone else’s life through your choices and consequences.

If you do not own your belief system, you will have a hard time being consistent with it when decisions need to be made. You will also have a hard time living with the results of those decisions, leaving you frustrated or in denial. It is essential to a fulfilled life that you operate on what you believe and on what passes your own reality test.

If, in honesty, you find that your belief system is not of your own making, take steps to correct this problem. I wrote an article sometime back titled “30 Things I Believe” this was my effort of ensuring the origin of my belief system. Being honest with myself while creating this document, my manifesto, was life changing.

An added complication is that your belief system has more than one component. Two common ones are religion and politics. These are also the most likely to be influenced by your friends and family. It is also common for these belief systems to be in conflict. Religion is based upon prescribed absolute truths and politics is based on marketing where truth is situational and always in flux. When you combine these two they make a toxic mix unless you synchronize them with what you value.

This becomes the second piece of defining what you believe. Your belief system should map to what you value. Testing the accuracy of your mapping is a reality check. Let me give you an example. If you are a Christian, you must accept the axiom that you can’t love Jesus if you don’t love people. If at the same time, you find it easy to attack and hurt others (especially those you disagree with), your belief system is not in sync with your values. Either you are fooling yourself about what you believe or you are fooling yourself about what you value.

In a fearless moral inventory, you must honestly evaluate the synchronization of your belief system to what you value. If you are out of sync, you are living a lie.

Moral Compass

Your moral compass is a combination of your belief system and a definition of what you value, which provides you a degree of guidance in decision making. Another way to state this is that your moral compass provides you with a definition of true north in your life. True north for some is defined by their religion, for others it may be their family or maybe just their own wellbeing. To be truly healthy and happy, your true north needs to be based upon a bed rock principle, not on opinion.

People get in trouble here because they bounce around between religious beliefs, a family focus, and a selfish focus. This approach is much like the guy who is switching lanes and using excessive acceleration in traffic only to find the cars he passed sitting next to him at the next stop light. A lot of wasted energy and frustration is the result. No one is perfect, but highly successful people are more consistent in paying attention to the position of true north in their lives than those who live moment to moment. They generally do not have to apologize to their family about a selfish decision they just made.

True north in your life does not bounce around. Circumstances in your life make it harder or easier to follow your moral compass, but true north is always true north. Simply put, your moral compass helps you to make decisions that take you where you want to go in the big picture of your life. This makes for clearer and cleaner decision making. A decision either takes you where you want to go or it doesn’t. Please don’t get me wrong, though. I know that there are situations where short term thinking has to prevail. Even in those cases, though, your moral compass will enable you to better understand what you are risking.

All of this being said, ask yourself the following two questions. What is true north in your life and do you consistently consult your moral compass in decision making. One way to answer these questions is to look at decisions you have made and ask yourself whether you were true to your moral compass at the time. Would decide differently now? Why or why not? Be honest and allow yourself to experience the feelings that result. These feelings will serve as a reality check when similar decision points are reached.

Consistency of Purpose

Purpose is related to action. Having purpose in your life gives you the “why” and the drive to take action. Everything we do in life has a purpose. The question is whether the purpose is in alignment with the philosophical underpinnings of your life. These underpinnings are your belief system and your moral compass.

To test this alignment, ask the following question. Does your adherence to your belief system change according to the situation you are in? Your answer to this question is probably “yes”. We are all human and subject to human emotions and instincts. Don’t consider this an excuse though. There is a difference between what we feel and how we act on our feelings. There are many of us who behave quite well in church, but lose our faith trying to fight traffic to get out of the church parking lot. If character is what you are in the dark when no one can see your actions, than what you truly value is demonstrated by your actions when under the pressure of difficult circumstances.

Here is another uncomfortable question. Do you hold yourself accountable to the same standards that you hold others to? You should, but it isn’t easy. This is why we see so many people in leadership fail. I once heard a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company say that his greatest accomplishment was making decisions that allowed him to sleep good at night. Being true to what he saw as his purpose allowed him to live comfortably with his actions.

This is only possible when you have a purpose to guide your efforts in the various roles you fill in life. When consistent with your belief system and moral compass, consistency of purpose will allow you to make decisions that you can feel good about . To define the purpose in your various life roles, ask yourself what roles you fill in your daily walk. Some examples are being a father/mother, husband/wife, son/daughter, brother/ sister, employee, friend and so on. List these out and next to them write the purpose you have in each of them.

Now comes the hard part. Next to each purpose evaluate on a scale of 1 to 5 (poor to excellent) how well you are performing in meeting your expectations in these roles. Be honest. The areas where you see the need for improvement become targets for a “Consistency of Purpose” action plan. In other words, you will have purpose to create a plan of action to bring alignment into your life.

If you really want to put it out there, ask the significant others in your life to evaluate how well you are performing.

Your Fears

Everyone has fears. It is human nature and part of our self-defense instincts. There is no shame in fear unless you let irrational fears control you. There are two aspects of controlling your fears. These are gaining an understanding of the source of your fear and taking action to mitigate them.

Fear will knock your life out of alignment. This is how political and sales operatives work. If you create a fear of something in a person’s life, you make it easy to hijack their belief system and moral compass. As a result, if you are to protect yourself, you must take action to understand and mitigate your fears.

Let me give you a personal example. I began writing a book a few years back. The subject matter was being challenged by a particular group of people, so I spend a great deal of time editing and re-editing trying to achieve perfection. My fear of rejection froze me in the edit mode until I took all of the teeth out of my manuscript. When I realized what was happening (someone else was in control of my creative process), I went back to my original manuscript and sent it to a publisher. I am now a published author with a product that has wide acceptance. Oddly enough, it even has acceptance with the very people that I perceived to be challenging me. My fear was unfounded, even though it seemed real to me.

To establish control over your fears, make a list of situations that create fear for you. For example, being in a dark room might make you fearful. Be thorough and honest. You want to document the situation that brings on the fear, not the fear itself.

On the same list, add a column titled “afraid of…” and fill in the blank beside each situation with what you are specifically afraid of in that situation. The fear you feel in a dark room, for example, is a typical human reaction, but what is its source? Psychologists will tell you that fear of the dark is nothing more than fear of the unknown. In this case, you can hear a sound, feel something or even smell something, but your fear will not be allayed until you see what it is. This is because of our dependence on vision as the primary sensory device on our bodies. Knowing this gives you power over your fear.

Next, you will need to have an action plan to face up to the fear. Fear of the dark, for example, can be mitigated by conditioning yourself to become more comfortable with what you can’t see. Just as a blind person must find a way to deal with what they cannot see, a person afraid of the dark must deal with the unknown.

Being the best that I can be requires that I perform this fearless moral inventory from time to time. I don’t always like what I find, but that is just part of being human. As I grow to understand myself better, I am also making adjustments to keep my life in alignment. Understand that if your belief system, moral compass and purpose in life are based on bed rock principles, these adjustments in alignment are made to your behavior, not the principles.

Content vs Context

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Walter McIntyre

Whether you are involved in a Six Sigma Project or just talking with friends we are bombarded with information that has two components. These are content and context. One is raw information about the “what” and the other is supporting information about the “why”.

Here is an example. A young man from Philadelphia shot and killed another man about a year ago. This is content. The fact that he did this, as a soldier, in a fire fight in Afghanistan is context. Content, as mentioned above, gives you the raw information and context helps you interpret the content.

When you grasp the importance of the relationship between content and context, you also begin to understand why listening skills are so important. As content information reaches your brain, contextual data is telling you how to interpret it. As good listener will be critically analyzing the information to determine its believability, relative importance, the deliverer’s purpose, the meaning behind the words and what information is missing.

Marketers use contextual information to try to spin your interpretation of content information on everything from products and services to politics. Knowledge that this is happening and dealing with it appropriately is key to your personal success. Do you remember the Ivory Soap by line that stated that their soap was “99 % Pure”? This is context without content. The question you should ask is 99% pure what?

In a Six Sigma project, contextual data is critical to drilling down to root causes. For example, simply pointing out that there is an increase in the defect rate of a manufacturing process is the content. Finding out that the defect rate spikes on the midnight shift when it is raining is the context. The drill down process can be represented mathematically as y=f(x)+f(x)+f(x)… . The progression from f(x) to f(x) is accomplished through the use of contextual information.

In sales, content information might be described as what product or service a shopper wants to purchase. Contextual information would be the shopper’s story, their buying motivation, budget and important product or service requirements. What this means is that as a business, you differentiate yourself from your competitors by way of context. The shopper can get the “what” from other sources. Context determines why they should get the product or service from you.

Walter McIntyre Lean Six Sigma