Again, your challenge is not just to improve. It is to break the service paradigm in your industry or market so that customers aren't just satisfied, they're so shocked that they tell strangers on the street how good you are.

Shareholder value is the result of you doing a great job, watching your share price go up, your shareholders win, and dividends increasing. What happens when you have increasing shareholder value? You're delivering better employees to their communities and they can give back. Communities are winning because employees are involved in mentoring and all these other things. Customers are winning because you're providing them new products.

A company has only so much money and managerial time. Winning leaders invest where the payback is the highest. They cut their losses everywhere else.

All of management is about self-confidence

Real change agents comprise less than 10% of all business people.

I am often asked if leaders are born or made. The answer, of course, is both. Some characteristics, like IQ and energy, seem to come with the package. On the other hand, you learn some leadership skills, like self-confidence, at your mother's knee, and at school, in academics and sports. And you learn others at work-trying something, getting it wrong and learning from it, or getting it right and gaining the self-confidence to do it again, only better.

Six Sigma is a quality program that, when all is said and done, improves your customers' experience, lowers your costs, and builds better leaders.