🏭The Goal

A plant has one goal, and every local measure that is not that goal can work against it. Output is set by the slowest resource, the 🧩 Bottleneck; an hour lost there is lost for the whole plant, and an hour saved anywhere else is a mirage. So find the constraint, protect it, and make everything else march to its pace.

• A business novel. I know. Priya said bottleneck in three meetings running and then left her copy on my desk.
• As fiction it is clunky: the marriage subplot exists so that the hero has somewhere to be late to.
• As an idea it is exact, and the hike with the scouts is the best explanation of a queue I have read.
• Read through the worst three weeks of 📂 Exceptions Inbox general availability, twenty pages a night, which is either ideal timing or the opposite.
• Finished on 21 February, the first evening I felt like a person again.
• Lent by Priya Raman, staff engineer: her copy, her pencil marks, returned in March. It counts for 🎯 Finish 16 books and keep notes on the ones that matter all the same, and it is the only book under ♦️ Systems thinking with a plot.
• No quoting a novel in copyright. The line pinned next to it is Emerson's 💬 A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin, which is what a utilisation target turns into. For the same shop floor described from the inside, see 🏛️ Taiichi Ohno and 🏛️ W. Edwards Deming.