Doesn’t Six Sigma Work for the Movies and TV Shows?
Posted by: meikah | 10 August 2008 | 11:50 pm
GE owns NBC. That’s a fact. NBC not profitting as according to GE’s expectations. That’s a conjecture.
But rumors have it that GE is actually thinking of selling NBC because of the latter’s disappointing performance in the ratings and profits game. CEO Jeff Immelt says otherwise, and insists that GE is not selling NBC.
I was especially struck at this phrase (in bold font) on BusinessWorld Online’s article:
The media unit is plainly out of place in the massive conglomerate, for which in 2007 it provided just under 9% of revenue. While in ‘07 NBC’s profit margins topped all GE segments, its revenue growth lagged that of the overall company in ‘06 and ‘07 and slowed to 0.1% in the first half of 2008. And no one today forecasts stability for big media companies.
The stock price of GE has more or less stagnated since CEO Jeff Immelt took over in 2001, in part because the notion of bona fide multi-industry titans like GE is considered passe. (Even media conglomerates are now passe.) And the governing narrative of GE is hard to extend to NBC. A key tenet of GE exceptionalism holds that it adds value to anything it touches by obsessing over management and management processes like Six Sigma. But that which debugs, say, making turbines simply won’t work for the woolly and unstandardizable ways in which movies and TV shows are made.
That made me ask: doesn’t Six Sigma work for the movies and TV shows?
Somehow, I’m having a hard time reconciling that. Six Sigma might or should work for these industries, too.
