My friend Mark Graban of Lean Blog fame nailed me today… and I deserved it. Mark commented on my recent post about Lowes missing their numbers.
I was actually as guilty as the folks at Qualpro in how I was trying to assign causation, meaning MVT was the reason Lowes missed their numbers. The sad thing for me was I blogged about this very concept of correlation, causation, and extrapolation a few months ago here.
In my defense I was actually trying to prove a point that Qualpro shouldn’t justify their MVT methodology in this manner… but I fell on the same sword they did.
Taiichi Ohno states in Workplace Management how he studied the sayings of Confucious as a young child. One of the sayings Ohno was fond of was, “The Wise Mend their Ways.” That is what this post is about tonight.
One final comment on this Qualpro/MVT subject. Oddly enough, today I came across an article written by Forrest W. Breyfogle III from the consulting firm Smarter Solutions. Mr. Breyfogle is a giant in the Six Sigma world and thus is probably a little biased (like I am I suppose.. biased that is as I am no giant). In any event he does a nice job explaining his view of this whole Qualpro debate. Check the whole story out here.
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