nts and Polaroid reported benefits ranging from $100 million to $800 million.
Six Sigma is therefore growing across different industries and geographies as more and more managers address their companies' need for continuous improvement. Larson (2003) argues that Six Sigma is about total employee involvement and the integration of customer needs and interests into all aspects of the firm's operations. Six Sigma also creates a culture that emphasizes diversity, employee training and retraining, workforce unity, mutual respect, a commitment to success, and a focus on customer satisfaction (Larson, 2003). Larson (2003) argues that while Six Sigma may have originated as a set of statistical tools used to measure quality and to eliminate defects through process improvements, it has become an attitude, a vision and a culture over time; indeed, there are those analysts, including Bhote (2002, 2003), who believe that unless Six Sigma becomes an essential element of organizational culture, it cannot achieve its real potential.
While many companies use Six Sigma extensively to restructure their entire business organization, others use Six Sigma in a less pervasive manner (Joyce, 2004). Six Sigma purists tend to argue that companies that do not embrace the full range of Six Sigma tools and processes are not "true" Six Sigma entities and are not likely to realize all of the benefits of this approach (Davis, 2003). Others believe that it is possible to ease into Six Sigma gradually and to customize Six Sigma techniques to meet the needs of each individual company (Brue, 2004).
The general premise of Six Sigma, according to Jones (2004, p. 24), is that:
àcompanies need consistently higher levels of quality and lower levels of cost and that a disciplined, organized approach will root out the variance, waste and errors that plague operations. It does not address problems at a superficial level. Rather, it attacks the root causes ...