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A common joke in engineering circles goes like this: A CEO, a senior VP and a top engineer have been kidnapped, but the company refuses to pay the ransom. In order to prove they are serious, the kidnappers ask the captives to record a personal message to the company. When each of them is asked what he plans to say, the CEO responds, "I'll give one last speech on the power of Six Sigma. The company's future depends on it." The VP says, "To expand that, I'll talk about the importance of benchmarking." The engineer thinks for a minute and responds, "Please shoot me first."

Disciples of Six Sigma, a quality improvement program designed to help companies keep a rigorous focus on improving existing processes, argue that it helps organizations achieve efficiency in everything they do. They're more than happy to point to the numbers that back them up. Motorola, which actually developed the system in the mid-1980s, claims Six Sigma has reduced its total costs by some $17 billion. General Electric—where former CEO Jack Welch adopted Six Sigma early on and became its most important evangelist—claims to save billions of dollars each year. And at Nortel, where the "turnaround team" started implementing something called Lean Six Sigma in April, 2006, the word is that savings already reach into the hundreds of millions of dollars. (Never mind for now that Nortel posted a second-quarter loss of $37 million in July.)

Across the board, Six Sigma's popularity has been startling: 40% of the companies surveyed recently by Bain Consulting were implementing Six Sigma objectives in one form or another. So why is it that employees groan—or worse, ask to be executed—when they hear bosses drop Six Sigma phrases such as "root cause analysis," "master black belt*" and "permanent corrective action" ?

It could be that programs such as Six Sigma undermine individual contributions to the company. After all, it's hard to feel as if you're doing something meaningful when the language of the workplace reduces you to a cog in an inhuman profit machine. But increasingly, top-level managers are groaning too, and that's because there is evidence to suggest that the numbers don't stand up to scrutiny. A recent study from QualPro, a consulting firm that advocates an alternative quality process, points out that 53 of 58 large companies that use Six Sigma have trailed the S&P 500 ever since they implemented it. As if on cue, once-mighty proponents of the program have begun to scale back their involvement, if not abandon it outright. Two of the most recent dropouts: 3M and Home Depot. In fact, Robert Nardelli, the former CEO of Home Depot, was forced out in part because his Six Sigma program was blamed for plummeting customer satisfaction and employee morale. At 3M, management is rolling back many Six Sigma initiatives: The program, it decided, was not compatible with the spirit of innovation that had once made 3M great. Invention is an inherently risky, wasteful and chaotic process—exactly the sort of stuff Six Sigma seeks to eliminate.

Efficiency never has been a guarantee of success. Take, for example, that miracle of the American West, the Pony Express. Much is made of the bravery of the young men who revolutionized mail delivery in the U.S., but the system ultimately rode upon the process improvements that squeezed the most out of the available technology: Horses were pushed to their limits, saddlebag design was tweaked to allow quick transfers from horse to horse, and there was even an ideal weight and family history for riders (120 pounds, orphans preferred). The results were impressive: Despite travelling across hostile territory and rough terrain at breakneck speeds, the Pony Express lost only one bag of mail in its history, a record that would have been good enough to earn the company a more-than-favourable Six Sigma rating. Of course, none of that saved the business from collapsing after just 19 months and sending its founders into bankruptcy when the invention of the telegraph rendered the Pony Express obsolete.

A century and a half later, and business is booming at Six Sigma Canada. Chief operating officer Rick Burns has been training personnel from Rogers Communications, TD Canada Trust, BMO and others. Only a few years ago, the firm, which charges up to $9,000 to train a novice "green belt," had to look outside of the country to find many of its clients. These days, up to 80% of its trainees are Canadians. Burns believes Canada is "about 10 years behind the U.S." in accepting the Six Sigma approach.

Perhaps that's not a bad thing. After all, the companies that are truly succeeding today are not the ones obsessed with squeezing the last drops of efficiency out of workers and products, but the ones that take risks and invest in research and development—free-wheeling innovators such as Apple and Google. At the Rotman School of Management, dean Roger Martin is convinced that systems like Six Sigma are throwing companies' priorities out of whack. When a company relies too heavily on meaningless defect counts and quarterly earnings reports, he wrote in Harvard Business Review, it is "not unlike a well-tuned car that heads over a cliff."