It was introduced by engineer Bill Smith while working at Motorola in 1980.  The term Six Sigma got registered because it was written that way when registered as a Motorola trademark on December 28, 1993. It was originated from terminology associated with statistical modeling of manufacturing processes. The maturity of a manufacturing process can be described by a sigma rating indicating its yield or the percentage of defect-free products it creates—specifically, within how many standard deviations of a normal distribution the fraction of defect-free outcomes corresponds to. Motorola set a goal of “six sigma” for all of its manufacturing.

Bill Smith generated billions of dollars for Motorola; he introduced his statistical approach aimed at increasing profitability by reducing defects. Smith, in later part of his life earned the title as ‘’Father of Six Sigma.’’ Today it has become a mainstream operation term in business world. As a fact of life the creator rarely gets rewarded for his creativity, as a Motorola employee, Smith did not share directly in the profits generated by the company’s Six Sigma applications. However, over the years, he and Motorola garnered numerous awards and recognition for his vital work to improve profitability in American manufacturing sector. Smith was proud of his role in Motorola’s winning the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award which is given for the best practices in quality management in U.S. The Baldrige Award came in 1988, two years after Motorola implemented Smith’s Six Sigma principles.

In 1995, Jack Welch included Six Sigma fundamentally in all his business strategies at General Electric (GE). He decided to give a thorough overhaul to General Electric; he was guided by engineers and consultants, and he realized that something needed to be done to reduce the operational defects throughout the company. Do you know that Jack Welch’s appointment came with the mandate to change the company for the better; the GE board told him that in whatever way necessary, Welch had to bring the changes? That’s where Six Sigma was brought into the processes at GE. Over the course of five years of Six Sigma implementation, GE reported savings of $12 billion. That is a gigantic improvement, isn’t it? Welch became a promoter of Six Sigma and championed its use in not just his own company, but in others around the world, even in small businesses.

What are the strengths of Six Sigma? It addresses quality problems; errors and defects and costing in terms of waste and delays. It helps in diagnosing and solving problems for getting solutions to problems with its dozens of tools. Once the diagnosis is complete, the right tool can be chosen for a rapid solution. It develops key metrics that first define the problem, then measure the defects and give desired and actual results. It can benchmark the methods at the backdrop of industry’s best practices. With an appropriate investment, a company that adopts Six Sigma can be a center of excellence developing its own best practices through continuous improvement. Another feature of Six Sigma is that it works well with other cutting-edge management tools, such as continuous improvement (kaizen), lean manufacturing, and agile development.

Features that set Six Sigma apart from previous quality-improvement initiatives include: a clear focus on achieving measurable and quantifiable financial returns from any Six Sigma project, an increased emphasis on strong and passionate management leadership and support, a clear commitment to making decisions on the basis of verifiable data and statistical methods, rather than assumptions and guesswork.

In recent years, some practitioners have combined Six Sigma ideas with lean manufacturing to create a methodology named as Lean Six Sigma. The Lean Six Sigma methodology views lean manufacturing, which addresses process flow and waste issues, and Six Sigma, with its focus on variation and design, as complementary disciplines aims at promoting business and operational excellence. Companies such as GE, Accenture, Verizon, GENPACT, 3M Corporation, Xerox, Allied, Conseco, Tata Steel and IBM use Lean Six Sigma to focus transformation efforts not just on efficiency but also on growth. It serves as a foundation for innovation throughout the organization, from manufacturing and software development to sales and service delivery functions. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published in 2011 the first standard “ISO 13053-1:2011” defining a Six Sigma process. Other “standards” are created mostly by universities or companies that have so-called first-party certification programs for Six Sigma.

Implementation of Six Sigma ensures accuracy to specification. 6 Sigma takes care of 99.73% of the process deviation. Organizations cannot afford to set a very loose specification, and, also, they cannot chip away the high assurance point as set in Six Sigma Model.
This means that Six Sigma itself is pretty difficult to achieve, therefore 7 Sigma and above is beyond belief.

The concept of design thinking can be described as a “way of thinking.” Herbert A Simson’s 1969 book ‘The Sciences of the Artificial’, and a book in design engineering by Robert McKim in 1973 titled ‘Experiences in Visual Thinking’, then in 1987 Peter Rowe’s book ‘Design Thinking’ all of these books describe methods and approaches used by architects and urban planners to design great cities. These people can think futuristically and that’s how the term ‘Design Thinking’ came and the early research data is collected from architects and urban planners on this topic. Design thinking can also be referred to as a method of creative action. Design thinking was adapted for business purposes by FAste’s Stanford colleague David M. Kelley, who founded IDEO in 1991.

Design thinking is a formal method for practical and creative  decision of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an improved future result. In this regard it is a form of solution-based or solution-focused thinking which starts with a goal of finding a better future situation instead of solving a specific problem. By considering both present and future conditions and parameters of the problem, alternative solutions may be explored concurrently.

Design thinking differs from the analytical scientific method, which begins with meticulously defining all the parameters of the problem in order to create a solution. Design thinking identifies and investigates with both known and ambiguous aspects of the current situation in order to discover hidden parameters and open alternative paths which may lead to the goal. Because design thinking is repetitive, midway solutions are also potential starting points of alternative paths, including redefining of the initial problem.

Recently Indira Nooyi of PepsiCo is in news for Design Thinking which she uses for driving innovation in the company. In 2012 she brought in Mauro Porcini as Pepsi’s first-ever chief design officer. Since then, Nooyi says, “design” has a influences nearly every important decision that the company makes. As CEO, Nooyi says that she visits a market every week to see how her products look like on the shelves. She looks at her products as a mom; she says she looks at “what products really speak to me.” She felt that the shelves just seem more and more cluttered; hence for the PepsiCo’s products to stand out on the shelves she decided to rethink their innovation process and design experiences for their consumers from formation stage of products to how the products get positioned on the shelf.

To begin with, she gave each manager an empty photo album and a camera. She asked them to take pictures of anything they thought represented a good design. After six weeks, only a few people returned the albums. Some had their wives take pictures. Many did nothing at all. They didn’t know what a design was.

The company did a search, and they found that Mauro Porcini had achieved great designing success at 3M. So PepsiCo brought him in to talk about their vision. He said he wanted resources, a design studio, and a seat at the table. They gave him all of that. And amazingly, teams at PepsiCo are now pushing design through the entire system, from product creation, to packaging and labeling, to how a product looks on the shelf, to how consumers look at it!

Even at GE, P&G, and other companies, a design perspective is a problem-solving apparatus that can be applied companywide. When the best and brightest managers from GE attend the company’s Crotonville learning center in Ossining, N.Y., for the Technical Leadership Development Course, they start it by reading a comic book. For many of the handpicked participants, this exercise seems uncomfortable which is encountered with design. They are stretched further over the two-week training as they’re asked to portray their toughest problem in a haiku and draw workflow.  For Lawrence Murphy, the chief engineer of global design for GE Healthcare who leads the sessions and helped start the program, the goal is to equip employees with new problem-solving tools to help the company develop “imagination at work” from its focus on operations efficiency tool Six Sigma.

The pioneers to start Design Thinking effectively are organizations such as GE Healthcare, Procter & Gamble (PG), and Philips Electronics (PHG). In addition to hiring design thinkers from schools, they have developed in-house programs to bring people from all functions of the organization to think through designing lens.

To build empathy with users, a design-centric organization empowers employees to observe behavior and draw conclusions about what customers want and need. Those conclusions are tremendously difficult to be expressed in quantitative language. Instead, organizations that “get” design use emotional language; words such that concern desires, aspirations, engagement, and experience to describe products and users. Team members discuss the emotional resonance of a value proposition as much as they discuss utility and product requirements.

Enriching design has boosted innovation and the bottom line at companies like GE. According a 2003 report by the Danish Design Center, increasing design activity such as design-related employee training has boosted a company’s revenue on average by 40% more than other companies over a five-year period. But the changeover can prove difficult, and trying to convince experienced managers of the value of design-led innovation can lead to dead ends.

“We warn them that they’ll be uncomfortable,” says Peter Coughlan, who co-leads the transformation practice at design consultancy IDEO. “I tell clients you won’t understand it until you experience it.” Changing a company’s culture can take years, he says, but the quickest route is to get managers to think about themselves as designers of their own organizations, which will help build support at all levels.

Instead of giving managers the design workshops as educational programs it’s better to give to them as problem-solving machine feels the Marketing Director of P&G. So P&G operates offsite design thinking workshops that bring together employees from across the organization, including R&D, market research, and purchasing, to use design methods such as visualization and prototyping to solve real problems for the company. The workshops run around the world by volunteer employees called facilitators which are from a half-day to a weeklong in duration.

For design thinking, people need in-depth interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable. The users need to be given a free hand to innovate, a control of prototyping, and tolerance for failure. Organizations need to cultivate culture of interactions and developing quick responses.  The focus of each employee in a company should be of customers comfort and satisfaction.

P&G plans to conduct more workshops and build design thinking into more activities. P&G offices in Latin America, Europe, and Asia are starting workshops and P&G plans to measure the performance of design-thinking inspired ideas and innovative products. Robert Schwartz, formerly associate director of P&G’s Global Design Organization, who now works for GE Healthcare is bringing design thinking knowledge to GE Healthcare, where he has been general manager of global design for the past two years. GE measures and rewards its employees not only on what they achieved but also how they achieved it based on “growth traits” such as clear thinking, inclusiveness, and imagination. When these traits become used more widely, the results in the marketplace are remarkable.

The focus on design-led innovation helped Philips Lighting to transform itself over the past decade from a company that simply pushed products into the market into one that designs them with customer desires in mind. The company’s term for its product development process integrates design into other functions such as marketing and technology and focuses on the end user. The company employs parameters as diverse as psychology, cultural sociology, anthropology, and trend research, in addition to the more conventional design-related skills. Although design is most often used to describe an object or end result, design in its most effective form is a process, an action, a verb not a noun.