re: 6 sigma and Immelt
“If you put yourself in my shoes additive manufacturing makes a s---load more sense than Six Sigma did. I was there the first day we did Six Sigma; it made no sense to me.”
Judging by that one sentence, these are the words of one whose heart is close to math. Statistics is not math, it's a way of articulating the workings of the stochastic world. 6 sigma says we have two possible outcomes, a successful or failed part, but by following protocol the chance of getting a failed part is quite small, 3.4 failures per million. He's talking about a deterministic world in which there's only one possible outcome after manufacturing a part, where the part is always a success, never a failure.
Yes, in my opinion, that's a manufacturing revolution that is bigger than 6 sigma. It's the "Big Rock Candy Mountain" of manufacturing.