My curiosity was piqued when I saw the article titled “Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Made His Top Executives Read These Three Books.” Bezos is an avid reader and last summer he hosted all-day (yes, all-day!) Book clubs with top Amazon executives. Bezos said he used these books as frameworks to sketch the future of the company, and one of the books they read and discussed was The Goal.

Subtitled “A Process of Continuous Improvement,” the first edition of The Goal was printed in 1984. Written like a novel, it is about the process of continuous improvement; based on a company’s manufacturing operations, but relevant to all organizations because it’s about people trying to understand what makes their world work so they can improve it. As characters “think logically and coherently about their problems, they are able to determine the” cause and effect “relationships between their actions and the results.”

In history, the manufacturing operation management team is struggling to return profitability to what was once a successful plant from being shut down for ownership.

Shipments are constantly delayed and there are months of production buildup, yet inventories of finished goods and work in progress are skyrocketing. Collectively, they wonder why they can’t consistently put out a quality product on time at a cost that can beat the competition.

Having three months to change the plant, the plant manager turns to a manufacturing guru who has a unique and potentially risky approach to addressing issues. First, he takes what can be a complicated topic, productivity, and defines it simply as the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. “Every action that brings a company closer to its objective is productive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its objective is not productive.” This begs the question: What is the goal?

The plant manager wonders if the goal is to buy profitably, employ good people, high technology, produce quality products, capture market share, customer satisfaction, etc. He ultimately decides that making money is the appropriate goal, and therefore, by the guru’s definition of productivity, an action that moves the plant toward producing money is productive. And an action that takes away from making money is not productive.

The management team agrees on three metrics to determine if the plant is making money: net profit, return on investment (ROI), and cash flow. It becomes obvious, then, that it is essential to build a connection between these three measures and what happens in the plant … down to every employee in the plant. Higher performance, lower inventories and lower operating expenses become his areas of focus to improve plant profitability.

Balancing the story involves the management team and factory workers employing new methods to identify and address performance bottlenecks (referred to as “finding Herbie”), understanding dependent and independent events, and analyzing fluctuations. statistics. The factory achieves incredible new levels of profitability and the plant manager gets a well-deserved promotion.

Some lessons the plant manager and his management team learned along the way:

• That people working or machines running and making money are not necessarily the same. In other words, having an employee working and benefiting from that job are potentially two different things. In the story, the guru says that “activating a resource and using a resource are not synonymous.” [How much unproductive activity do you have in your organization?]
• The true bottlenecks are any resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed on it. And a non-bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it. [Where are the “bad” bottlenecks in your company?]
• That bottlenecks are not necessarily bad, or good, they are simply a reality and should be evaluated to determine if they help or hinder the overall performance of the system. [Do you know which of your bottlenecks are good and which are bad?]
• That the capacity of the plant is equal to the capacity of its bottlenecks. [Think of it as a group of hikers who can only progress as quickly as the slowest walker. Or that a team is only as strong as its weakest member.]
• Improvement requires a change. And change means uncertainty that translates into fear. “We are venturing from what is safe and known to what is unknown, a move that most people are afraid to make.” It is human nature to live for control, predictability, and certainty. [How much of what you do is actually directed against change?]
• That actually a small number of constraints govern overall performance. [Do you know the key constraints that are holding you or your organization back?]
• Do not focus all your energy on the improvements themselves, but on the improvement process. [Thus the book’s subtitle “A Process of Ongoing Improvement.” Is continual improvement in your organization’s DNA?]
• You must know what your goal is before you can optimize a system (for example, yourself, a factory, a team, a company, etc.). Otherwise, there is likely a lot of unproductive activity. [What is your goal? Do you really know what it is? And are you on the right path to accomplish it?]

Good luck finding your “Herbies” (limitations, bottlenecks, obstacles) and tackling them to make your path to success easier.