There is no secret formula

Some of us remember when Six Sigma was the answer to everything. Before that it was Total Quality Management, then Business Process Re-engineering, then Balanced Scorecards, Agile, and now, of course, artificial intelligence. Each arrived with conferences, certificates and consultants. Each contained a good idea. And each was, at some point, sold as the cure for problems it was never designed to solve.

Good tools, wrong places

Six Sigma is a fine example. It was developed at Motorola in the 1980s to reduce defects in manufacturing, and it works well where the aim is to make the same thing, the same way, with fewer mistakes. General Electric made it famous in the 1990s. When a former GE executive brought it to 3M, a company that lives on invention, the results were mixed. According to BusinessWeek, the share of 3M's sales coming from products less than five years old fell from about one third to about one quarter, and his successor relaxed the programme in the research laboratories. A method built for consistency had been applied to creativity.

The lesson is not that Six Sigma is bad. It is that every tool has a home. Bain & Company surveyed thousands of executives over several years about the management tools they used, and 81 per cent agreed that such tools promise more than they deliver. Not because the tools are useless, but because they are often chosen for the wrong reasons: because a competitor uses them, or because they are in fashion.

Be careful with dramatic statistics too

You may have heard that seventy per cent of all change programmes fail. It is quoted everywhere. When a British management researcher went looking for the evidence behind it, he found none that was valid and reliable. We mention this not to be clever, but because it illustrates our point: in management, much of what everybody knows turns out to be less certain than it sounds. Good decisions start with checking.

Every business is different

Some companies run perfectly well on traditional methods, a paper ledger and a loyal team. Wanting to modernise is understandable, but sometimes the better choice is to protect what already works and strengthen it. Other companies need specialised systems for their industry. And some genuinely need a thorough modernisation. There is no single formula that suits them all.

That is why we do not arrive with a ready-made solution. We arrive with questions. We may know a great deal, but we do not know every business in the world, and we certainly do not know yours yet. So we look first: at your market, your people, your numbers and the way work actually flows through your company. Only then do we suggest what might help, whether that is a new system, a small change in routine, or simply the confidence to keep doing what you do well.

Fresh eyes, long experience

What an outside adviser can offer is a pair of fresh eyes combined with experience from many other places. The tools come afterwards, and they should be the right size for the job.