Forrest W. Breyfogle III

While working at IBM, Forrest Breyfogle III (there is a Forrest V) took a Design of Experiments (DOE) workshop in 1975 that changed his life. From this DOE training, Forrest became excited about the benefits of wisely applied statistical techniques. In the early 1980s, Forrest transitioned to being a full-time internal IBM statistical consultant, a position that he held for ten years until retiring from the company in 1992. Perhaps it was his formal engineering training that brought Forrest to the conclusion that he viewed things differently from traditional process improvement practitioners and management. Forrest believed he offered an enhanced approach for addressing many operational situations; hence, after retiring from IBM, he named the company that he founded in 1992 Smarter Solutions. In the mid-1990s, Forrest, under contract for the company that had introduced Six Sigma in GE, conducted his first Black Belt process improvement training in Toronto and Northern Ireland. Forrest's book, Implementing Six Sigma: Smarter Solutions Using Statistical Methods, was later published in 1999 by Wiley and is arguably the first technical book on Six Sigma. The second edition of this book won ASQ's Crosby Medal in 2004. Smarter Solutions, Inc. helped many organizations and practitioners apply Lean Six Sigma concepts; however, Forrest observed problems with traditional Lean Six Sigma implementations and practices. Forrest also saw issues with how practitioners and management created and reported metrics and how they undertook process improvement efforts. Over the years, Forrest documented problems that he observed and what to do differently, using his developed 9-step Integrated Enterprise Excellence business management system. Forrest did not believe he was adequately conveying his message both about the problems that he had observed with traditional process improvement and business management practices and what to do differently. Forrest thought that there was a need for a better vehicle to share what he had seen over the years and what organizations and individuals could do to make things better. Because of this belief, Forrest wrote the book, Management 2.0: Discovery of Integrated Enterprise Excellence and its follow-up, Leadership System 2.0: Implementing Integrated Enterprise Excellence. In this two-book-novel series, the dialog among several book characters shares what Forrest has observed over the years about what to do differently to address these problems. Forrest decided to invest money to develop a standalone software app that these books would provide free so that individuals and organizations could benefit from the powerful 30,000-foot-level reporting techniques described in the books. He also invested monies to create the software to implement the entire IEE system behind an organization's firewall. With this implementation, organizations can have automatically updated 30,000-foot-level report-outs that often provide a prediction statement, where, if a prediction statement is not desirable, the underlying process needs enhancement. Since people do not often have the time to read books, Forrest also decided to offer the two books, Management 2.0 and Leadership System 2.0, as audiobooks in addition to a paperback and e-book format. Forrest has a MS degree in engineering from the University of Texas. He is an ASQ Fellow and CEO of Smarter Solutions. He has authored over a dozen books. Forrest was named Quality Professional of the Year for 2011 by Quality Magazine and in 2012 was awarded alumni of the year by Missouri University of Science and Technology. He received the 2013 Lean & Six Sigma World Conference Leadership Award.