[alexmlamb]

The idea of Six Sigma never made sense to me. I read a book on it, and it basically said that you should optimize a business so that mistakes are extremely rare (the six sigma refers to that point on a N(0,1) gaussian cdf).

The idea that you should try to avoid making mistakes seems like a good one, but also is rather obvious, and the right threshold is also obviously problem dependent.

I suppose the idea is kind of fluff, but of all the fluffy ideas out there, trying to be reliable and dependable is probably one of the better ones.