We were delighted to launch our new Lean Six Sigma book, “Lean Six Sigma for Leaders” at an evening event hosted at the British Quality Foundation (BQF) offices in London on Thursday 10th May.
In true Catalyst style guests were invited to the Cocktail SIPOC – a practical and visual tool for describing the necessary inputs and process steps needed to produce an Elderflower French 75 cocktail as the primary output of the process.A series of experiments then took place regarding the combination of inputs and the results were a lot of chatter and clatter and a very positive Lean Six Sigma culture quickly spread around the room ☺
We were privileged to have the CEOs of not just one, but two great quality organisations attend, with Ian Swain, CEO of the BQF, and Vince Desmond, CEO of the CQI, both at the event and testing the quality of the cocktails.
Martin thanked everyone who has been involved in writing the book and paid tribute to the late John Morgan who continues to be an inspiration for everyone at Catalyst. He also thanked other members of the Catalyst team who have been so supportive and those who contributed guest chapters – Vince Grant, James Dwan and Chris Merriman.
He particularly thanked Jo Dowdall who has gained a reputation as a great blog writer and is one of the Catalyst trainer/coaches. Jo said it was really nice to see all the hard work culminating in the book and how the case studies underlined everything that we wrote about in the book. Martin said how important he felt the leadership role is, which is why he selected the subject when asked by Wiley to write the new book and that the title could have been “Lean Six Sigma …or whatever you want to call it….for Leaders” as this is “about Quality; Continuous Improvement; Operational Excellence; Business Excellence; or whatever you decide to call it. The key thing is the leadership role.” Martin also mentioned the Leaders’ case studies which bring the theory to life for example Kevin Barrett from Coopervision (now the world’s 2nd largest contact lens manufacturer) who heads up their European Operations. Kevin has been a great proponent for many years and he deeply believes in the approach. Martin wanted to encapsulated his thinking in the book.
Martin’s message was “You can make this happen, in your organisations. It is hard work, it is relentless, but it delivers results”. He was pleased that Vince Desmond the CQI’s CEO had come to support the launch in the CQI’s centenary year and said that “there is a strong message here about quality going into the future and believing in what we can do together for the world and for society.” Catalyst has recently been accepted as an Associate Partner of the CQI and is working on a number of projects in support of the centenary events. He also thanked Ian Swain, CEO of the BQF, who wrote the Forward to the book. Ian said he was delighted to have so many award winners also present at the event, including Elaine Marzell a Black Belt award winner from Coopervision and Rushmi Laidlaw who heads up CI at the Office for National Statistics who won the Lean Six Sigma Award back in 2014.
Martin finished by thanking everyone again and ended with the message “Let’s go on and make Quality happen!”
