Equally self-deluding are those who insist rather more pretentiously that they were the victims of a ‘six-sigma event’. The only advantage of this expression is that it may scare away the follow-up question. Who wants to sound stupid by admitting that they don’t know what ‘six sigma’ means even if the guy in front of them has just cost them a fortune? Sigma (standard deviation) is a measure of how frequent various outlying events (or numbers) are relative to an average occurrence. A six-sigma event is something that should happen so infrequently that you might have heard about a guy who had
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