It was in 1979, when Motorola began to realize the extent to which it had lost market share in many key segments, including televisions, radios and semiconductors. During a company officers meeting that same year, Motorola as president and CEO Bob Galvin asked the question, what's wrong with our company? many officers and corporate chiefs began voicing the standard politically correct excuses. Blame it on the Japanese blame it on the economy in general, blame it on the weak research and development. While all this was going on, a lone voice in the back of the room spoke up loudly and clearly saying, I will tell you what's wrong with this company. Our quality stinks.
That voice was art Sandra, a sales manager for Motorola's most profitable business at the time. Everyone thought he would be fired for this bold assertion. How could someone make such a statement in such horrible and turbulent times? Surely, Motorola had always been and still was among the world's best manufacturers. Regardless of the hard times it was facing. Galvin listened and he listened more to sunrise explanation of why he said what he said the highly credible industrial leader he was, Galvin then proceeded to validate sunrise assertions by visiting Motorola's factories, shipping docks and other operations.
He didn't go to the big executives, because he took quality personally. He went all the way to individual and you And when he got there, they told him your quality strings. In parallel. There was an engineer at Motorola named Bill Smith, who had become known for his work in studying the relationship between manufacturing defects and field reliability. Dr. Michael Harry entered the picture of Motorola in 1983. As a doctoral intern, Smith began a dialogue with Dr. Michael Harry.
Six Sigma was Bill Smith's brainchild, and Dr. Harry was involved only as much as necessary to be an intellectual vacuum absorber who served up any and all material that could help him accomplish his engineering assignments. But he later tasked himself with rethinking about the value of Six Sigma to Motorola. He wrote a white paper the nature of Six Sigma quality In 1986, and then expanded it as a booklet in 1987. That booklet, traveled all over Motorola and became so influential that Dr. Harry received a call from Bob Galvin. Galvin told Dr. Harry the booklet was very good, and asked him if there was a time when they could travel to the headquarters of Boeing and help explain Six Sigma to its CEO and chairman of the board. on the plane, Dr. Harry was given the task by Galvin to get six sigma to 100,000 people in 52 locations around the world speaking 15 different languages at Motorola.
All of this was required to be done in one year. And the rest is history. Dr. Harry took up the task and made six sigma A successful methodology that not only transformed organizations but also those who learned and deployed it. The methodology was then picked up by various organizations that we had studied in the earlier chapter. Motorola also won the coveted Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1988. For its quality initiative of deploying Six Sigma across the organization