How Top Brands Create Products People Love

Six Sigma have you guys heard of Six Sigma before maybe yes like really large multi-billion dollar Brands started to employ this there are famous stories I think uh about the Honda manufacturing line that they gave each employee the ability to pull a chain to stop the entire assembly line the CEO was like oh my God this is the worst idea I've ever employed this is how Honda went from being a laughed at auto manufacturer to one of the world's leading manufacturers we know of companies like Google Tesla and apple it's often talk about in reverent

tones in terms of how Innovative they are and we know that Google and and companies like Amazon are really pushing the boundaries here's a company that you might not normally associate with Innovation but Samsung being a Korean Electronics manufacturer has really become super Innovative in their products and their design they're taking over pretty much every display that you're using they're super Innovative company so what's the common thread what is their creative or Innovative DNA what does that look like now it's easy for us as consumers to recognize certain things and I got this information from

the book The designful Company by Marty newm Kelton research said that seven out of 10 Americans when asked with why they had to have a certain product what do you think they said s out of 10 Americans said why you had to have like I have to have this think about the things in your life that you have to have where you may pay a premium for it that you might wait in line for it that you tell other people you become unofficial brand ambassadors for that product just your image what what do you want

people to think about you and to see you you know rocking that product or whatever right so in a way having that product gives you social status exactly very good very good and what is it about that thing that gives you that social status it could be a car it could be a phone could be a television set could be a pair of shoes what what is it that pulls you in I know it's in the tip of your tongue and I'll help you out because we'll play Hangman guys this many letters you want to

buy a vowel I give you a vowel yes who said that oh excellent okay he said design it's design hopefully I have enough letters here that would be a hard fail right at the beginning it's design okay so part of this is that now we live in this very um relatively speaking in human history we live in an age of abundance and we're looking for Transcendent experiences things that make us feel something there's an emotional connection to these things so they employ design and designers and design thinking now most of us think about the design

and associate with things like what it looks like but design is how it functions there is a Nobel laurate his name is Herbert Simon he's a social scientist and he defines Design This Way he says that everyone who takes a course of action to change an existing condition to improved one from an ugly Bland shoe to one that's really cool we can look at design impacting things not just products but culture Community the way we eat the way we consume the whole life cycle of products that can all be designed so all we have to

do is is look at an existing condition and make a change to improved one I want to broaden the definition design because it's not just for people in the visual arts and if we Elevate our thinking towards more than what it looks like then maybe we can come upon a real solution Six Sigma have you guys heard of Six Sigma before maybe yes Six Sigma was invented by a guy named Bill Smith and he worked for Motorola and he developed a system and the idea of Six Sigma was to streamline the manufacturing process to remove

mistakes and defects that's really what it's for so if you look at a Six Sigma and somebody's like well what is Six Sigma and why are there only five letters if it's Six Sigma they're not related I'll explain in a second okay Sigma is Greek I believe for standards deviation and so this is the number of units of standard deviation and it works inverse to what you think the higher the number the fewer deviations there are so when they talk about reaching a certain point in terms of defects per million of opportunities if you were

to look in a small Library there would be like one misspelled word that's what they're looking for like in the books in a small Library that's the margin of err and so what they're doing is they're looking for operational excellence and the goal of Six Sigma is to make the customers happy make customers happy that sounds pretty good because we don't want them to have to pick up a car and then that car to fall apart or parts to break down or the tolerances between the door gaps are too wide and so it creates problems

right so it's really about manufacturing and this idea really took on within leadership and CEOs of large corporations GE turned out to be like the biggest Champions and deployed the system like really large multi-billion dollar Brands started to employ this I'll talk about this a little bit there's a felet acronym to help you remember DME right Define measure analyze improve and control when we're looking at say like an assembly line and we said like if something is broken at the end of the assembly line we have to like Define what the problem is so we

form some kind of hypoth hesis and what the goal is the goal could be as simple as we want to reduce the number of Rejects at the end of the assembly line down to like 1 out of 1 million where do we think it's breaking down so we form a hypothesis we set the goal and we figure out like how can we measure well this one's very easy to measure because if 999,999 products come out approved then we've hit our goal so we like we need to know how to measure if we're being successful or

not right so you ask yourself what needs to be improved and can it be measured and then you analyze the process you start to study like okay it seems to be breaking down here and it could just be the the the break in the manufacturing pipeline is that the person who's working at this station it could just be that they don't have enough lighting so they're not putting the part together so we test right so we're going to say analyze the process and we try to look for the cause in this case in this example

the cause we assume that there was not enough lighting and we can try that and then later on we can realize that as much lighting as we put on the problem it hasn't improved the situation and then we say okay what can we do to improve so now we're like okay we figured out what we think is the root cause we validate the hypothesis and we want to develop ideas to remove the root causes whatever that might be and we're going to test that and then if that works that becomes the new standard and we

measure the results last thing is the control to establish the measures to maintain the performance to make sure that this doesn't pop up again now there are famous stories I think uh about the Honda manufacturing line that they gave each employee the ability to pull p a chain to stop the entire assembly line This is how Honda went from being a laughed at auto manufacturer to one of the world's leading manufacturers known for Quality Honda and Toyota employ the same system right so every time the employee on the line would see a problem they would

pull chain and would stop they would have a meeting about it and they would talk about this and this went out for weeks and months and the CEO was like oh my God this is the worst idea I've ever employed but eventually they started to root out all the problems and then they started to manufacture higher quality products with fewer defects as explained in the book by Marty new Six Sigma has become the default standard of how to run a company how to run your business but here's the thing we cannot innovate by making small

refinements we cannot innovate by streamlining products that in the age where there were barriers to production from factories and distribution and customer ignorance making a higher quality product is all you needed to have for a competitive Advantage but today we have to give the uh the consumers the your customers something radically different