A Baldrige Legend

October 17th, 2011

Filed Under: Featured

Tags: Baldrige Award • cycle time • Galvin • leadership • Motorola • quality • Six Sigma

Bob Galvin died last week at the age of 89. He ran Motorola, the company his father founded, from 1959 to 1988, transforming it from a national company with sales of $290 million to a global corporation with sales of $10.8 billion.
Galvin helped launch the Baldrige program. Under his leadership, Motorola had become a global quality leader. Six Sigma became a systematic approach to quality improvement at Motorola, where Galvin notoriously demanded 10x improvements in quality and cycle time from one year to the next. In a Financial Executive report, he bragged that “we hardly take a serious interest in less than a 50% improvement” in cycle time. To make his point, he described a Motorola pager that had taken 44 days to make to customer specifications that, through quality and cycle time improvements, was being delivered in less than two hours.
He took these improvements personally.
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