Six Sigma and related business strategies are a very wide field. My intention here is to create a definitive list of suggested reading resources. Please let me know about your favorite books and how you’ve used them here!
Of course, my lists aren’t the only ones. ASQ has this list of green belt reference books and this list of black belt reference books.
My Favorite Six Sigma Books for Contextual Knowledge
- Straight from the Gut – This was the book that I believe started Six Sigma adoption at my company. I recognized that all of the executives at my company were reading this the month it came out and immediately got a copy. It serves as an autobiography for GE’s Jack Welsh but illustrates how and why he deployed Six Sigma at the enterprise level.
- Porter’s Five Forces – This is the seminal book on business strategy. Perhaps more important to read and apply this material than to even take the Six Sigma certification.
- The Lean Start-Up – We are living in the start-up generation. Eric Reis applies traditional Six Sigma tools to ensure business start-up success. Especially important to anyone who has been told that Six Sigma is not applicable to software development.
- Best Value: Six Sigma for Small Business – You can get this one for free in PDF format here! Informal and engaging, by casting Six Sigma as something applicable to small businesses, you gain an understanding of Six Sigma DMAIC methodology through the perspective of actionable techniques anyone can use.
- Optional: The GE Way – I debated putting this one here. In short, this is a good book but redundant – both to some of the other material on this list and also to itself. In the end, I left it on because I found it very helpful to read while traveling. You get great excerpts and quotes and the redundancy is helpful if you’re consuming it on the go and have a lot of interruptions and context switching going on.
Six Sigma Books to Take With You to the Black Belt Exam
ASQ Suggested Reference Books for Six Sigma Black Belts
- Statistical Methods for Engineers and Scientists
- The Memory Jogger II
- Implementing Six Sigma: Smarter Solutions Using Statistical Methods
- Integrated Enterprise Excellence: Improvement Project Execution: A Management and Black Belt Guide for Going Beyond Lean Six Sigma and the Balanced Scorecard.
- Benchmarking: The Search for Industry Best Practices That Lead to Superior Performance
- The Six Sigma Way: How GE, Motorola, and Other Top Companies are Honing Their Performance
- Practical Nonparametric Statistics
- Tolerance Design: A Handbook for Developing Optimal Specifications
- Introduction to Statistics and Probability
- Six Sigma Team Dynamics: The Elusive Key to Project Success
- Lean Six Sigma for Service: How to Use Lean Speed and Six Sigma Quality to Improve Services and Transactions
- The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook: A Quick Reference Guide to Nearly 100 Tools for Improving Quality, Speed, and Complexity
- Nonparametric Methods for Quantitative Analysis
- Statistical Quality Control
- The Visual Factory: Building Participation Through Shared Information
- Juran’s Quality Planning and Analysis for Enterprise Quality
- Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World’s Top Corporations
- Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success
- Applied Multivariate Statistical Analysis
- The Lean Company: Making the Right Choices
- Juran’s Quality Handbook
- The Certified Six Sigma Black Belt Handbook
- Six Sigma Project Management: A Pocket Guide
- Design & Analysis of Experiments, 7th ed
- Six Sigma for The Shop Floor A Pocket Guide
- Customer-Centered Six Sigma: Linking Customers, Process Improvement, and Financial Results
- Competitive Manufacturing Management: Continuous Improvement
- Quality Engineering Using Robust Design
- The Six Sigma Handbook
- Quality Engineering Handbook
- Six Sigma Pocket Guide
- The Team Handbook
- A Revolution in Manufacturing: The SMED System
- A Quick Changeover for Operators: The SMED System
- Statistical Methods
- TPM: Total Productive Maintenance
- Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation
- Design for Six Sigma for Service
Comments (1)
You should add CSSBB PRIMER by quality council of Indiana. My friend used this book to pass the ASQ BB for the first try.