Cover -- Title Page -- Contents -- About the author -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Culture -- A time in which minds were expanded, but products lagged behind -- The search for human beauty -- The first step: appreciating quality -- When human values matter -- Understanding people at work -- Listening to customers; anticipating their needs; building a relationship -- The chief executives' embrace -- Organizational maturity -- The culture of a six sigma company -- The 'best possible' mindset -- The driver of change -- Customers first? -- A conviction in the potential of people -- Timing -- The rest of this book -- 2 What is six sigma? -- Consistency, taste and variation -- Consistency, accuracy and precision -- Variables -- Continuous variables -- Attributes -- Distributions -- Dispersion -- Central limit theorem and the normal distribution -- Six sigma -- Probability -- 3 The transformation that is six sigma -- A climate of open-mindedness -- Clarifying the goals -- Critical success factors -- Self-assessment -- Critical success factors and self-assessment at Motorola -- Cascade the aims -- Develop skills -- Cascading the aims and developing skills at Motorola -- Developing skills -- Supporting teams -- Supporting teams at Motorola -- Counselling members -- Targeted marketing -- Ongoing review -- References -- 4 The product development cycle -- Product development versus new product development -- Product design -- Process design -- What happens when things go wrong? -- Hearing the voice of the customer -- Why don't the problems get resolved? -- It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it -- It is a production problem -- It is the designer's problem -- The product development cycle -- System design -- Parameter design -- Where experience is limited -- Where the skills and interest are lacking -- Tolerance design -- References -- 5 Quality function deployment -- Why is quality function deployment necessary? -- Why listen anyway? -- We already listen -- The problems of poor communication -- Internal barriers -- The 'yo-yo' syndrome -- Whose problem is it anyway? -- Top-down versus front-line-in -- Function versus function -- Specializations -- What are we trying to get right? -- Optimize the product -- Optimize the process -- Target versus tolerance -- The organizational learning curve -- What is quality function deployment? -- Step 1: What do the customers want? -- Step 2: What are the customers' priorities? -- Step 3: What are the customers' perceptions? -- Step 4: How good are the technical responses? -- Step 5: How do the technical responses relate to customers' expectations (relationship matrix)? -- Step 6: If the technical response is changed, what will be the effect? -- Step 7: What are the specifications for each technical response? -- Step 8: How do your competitors compare technically? -- Step 9: What incentives are there to change? -- Step 10: How tough will it be to change? --T$10.