Jack Welch heeft met GE een belangrijke rol gespeeld bij de populariteit van Six Sigma. In het boek Jack Welch Speaks - Wisdom from the worlds's greatest business leader heeft Janet Lowe een aantal van zijn Six Sigma-quotes verzameld:

We have a massive scientifically based quality undertaking in progress at GE, which will take us, within four years, to a level of process excellence that will produce fewer than four defects per milion operations performed in every manufacturing and service process across the company. It is the most challenging and potentially rewarding initiatieve we have ever undertaken at General Electric.

A typical process at GE, generates about 35,000 defects per million, which sounds ike a lot and is a lot, but its consistant with the defect levels of most succesful companies. That number of defecs per million is referred to in the very precise jargon of statistics as about three and one-half sigma. For those of you who flew to Charlottesville, you are siting here in your seats today because the airlines record in getting passengers safely from one place to another is even better than six sigma, with less than one-halfe failure per million.

If you think about airlines, they run two operations. They get you from point A to point B from seven to eight sigma. Your bags get there at three sigma.

We blew up the old quality organization, because they were off to the side. Now, it's the job of the leader, the job of the manager, the job of the employee - everyone's job is quality.

We want to change the competitive landscape by being not just better than our competitors, but by taing quality to a whole new level. We want to make our quality so special, so valuable to our customers, so important to their success, that our products become their only real value choice.

Forty percent of every mananager's bonus is tied to his hor her progress on quality results. Quality is the top item on every agenda in every business in this company. For leaders who do not see how critical quality is to our future ... GE is simply not the place to be.

Just as workout got us to a culture of learning and openess that defined the way we behave, quality improvement, under the disciplined rubric of Six Sigma methodology, will define the way we work.

Bron: Jack Welch Speaks - Wisdom from the worlds's greatest business leader, Janet Lowe