Gregg Young is the President & Founder of Young Associates. With 30+ years in the industry, he is the author of three books focused on upgrading business processes by adding these convergent, observation-based methods to existing processes. You can get in touch with Gregg @ gregg@youngassocinc.com.
White Paper from Gregg Young, Young Associates
When Motorola received one of the initial Baldrige Awards in 1988, Public Law 100-107 that created the Award required each Award recipient:
“to provide information about [its] successful quality improvement strategies and programs”, “to provide specific guidance on how to manage for high quality and detailed information on how they were able to change their culture”, and “to help others improve their quality management.
The government also published guidelines that applicants had to follow. These guidelines state:
“Recipients are required to share information on their successful performance and quality strategies with other U.S. organizations. However, recipients are not required to share proprietary information, even if such information was part of their award application.”
This last sentence has had a massive impact on the success of thousands of organizations around the world over the last 20 years – every organization that has implemented Motorola’s MAIC Six Sigma® process. Motorola took full advantage of the guidelines. It complied by revealing the basic strategy and structure of its Six Sigma Problem Solving process, its MAIC framework, as the strategy for others to use to solve problems.
However, Motorola correctly feared that revealing all the powerful tools it had used would be giving away the significant competitive advantage it had worked so hard to achieve. Doing so would have told all its direct and indirect competitors exactly how to close the gap. Consequently, Motorola taught its strategy and treated its critical tools as proprietary.
This white paper introduces the powerful tools that Motorola considered too valuable and proprietary to share, and it provides the proof that this substitution occurred – both published documentation and the results of Motorola and others.