Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has a nice piece on TOC and how valuable it is. And he mentions that Jeff Bezos has all his Amazon executives read The Goal. What I'd love to see is an article that describes HOW a company like Amazon is using TOC within the business.
Is the goal of a for-profit company to "make more money, now and in the future"? I suppose it depends on how you define the terms.
I hope your 2014 has been exciting and challenging. And I hope that your 2015 brings new adventure and new learnings.
I've come across several recent articles in the press from India that talk about Theory of Constraints and the application at a number of companies.
"Pride and Joy" by Alex Knight is a Theory of Constraints business novel about a hospital in chaos and a way of thinking that can help move beyond the chaos to a truly patient-centric, high quality environment.
There is an InnoCentive challenge to describe a KM approach to "Capturing Institutional Memory and Knowledge." Open through 14 October 2014.
Freek Vermeulen's "Business Exposed" is a great read that debunk a lot of common practice and common beliefs within business. He brings in a variety of business research to back up his sometimes surprising observations.
Rather than describe the solution - a description that is always going to be lacking - understand what problem the customer is trying to solve. What limitation or barrier do they need to overcome? And why do they want to do that?
Clarke Ching has posted a chapter of his ever-in-beta book on Agile / TOC in software developmetnt. His comments ring true and remind me of things that Dave Snowden talks about frequently.
"Knowledge is a treasure chest and its keys are questioning." -Ibn Shihab
Big Visible posted a great photo / poster a few weeks ago with their article Velocity Is Like A Helium Balloon. While their focus is Agile development, the thinking behind it can be applied to just about any area of improvement. "Velocity is like a helium balloon. It will rise on its own, if nothing is holding it down!"
One of the many people I follow on Twitter, Richard Cushing, has been interviewed and the results posted as "Where Does Your ERP Selection Fit with Your Continuous Improvement Efforts?"
Off topic for this blog, but if you get annoyed by trying to find administrative tools in Windows 7, this is inforamtion on setting password policies. The trick is to "run as administrator" - yes, even if your profile has you as administrator.
Yishai Ashlag's new book, TOC Thinking: Removing Constraints for Business Growth, is a good overview of the Theory of Constraints approach to thinking about running organizations.
Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business has a lot of familiar material in it. Duhigg puts it together in a compelling story that talks about why we get stuck in ruts - in personal life and in business life - and the paths to breaking out of the rut.
Jason Jennings' book Less is More: The main idea: focus. Focus on one thing - one thing for the long term, not one thing this quarter. And that one thing is the big idea of the organization - why is the organization on the planet? That big idea sets the direction and the yardstick by which everything is measured.
A theme has emerged for me at TOCICO 2014 across many of the talks and discussion this year. We generate big changes in implementing Theory of Constraints in organizations. And those big changes by their very nature create conflicts. How should we respond to these conflicts?
As usual, I'm exhausted after four days of listening and thinking and talking about the Theory of Constraints. Today was loaded with shorter sessions and more interesting conversations.
I attended a number of talks on CCPM today at TOCICO, as that is work I am doing these days. And these weren't even all the material that was available on CCPM. There were also some great hallway conversations.
The TOCICO conference has shifted from longer talks and workshops to 30-minute updates and case studies. This gives me the excuse to summarize in one post, rather than a post for each session.