| Monday, June 28, 2010

My summer reading has arrived and seen as I have ordered books which are relevant to both my blog and my business, I thought it would be a good idea to share them with you and blog about them as I go along.

That way I can try and verbalise how the ideas in each book might fit into my projects and thoughts and you can comment on how they fit into yours.

‘The Goal’, by Eli Goldratt

First off is ‘The Goal’ by Israeli physicist and business thinker Eli Goldratt.

The Goal is the first in a series of didactic business novels that Goldratt has written to help people understand his Theory of Constraints—a theory which develops ideas on how to identify the underlying causes of the problems which are holding you back.

Goldratt wants to help you identify and tweak the few key underlying things which will then cause your visible problems to disappear, almost like a business doctor: “we can postulate a very small number of assumptions and utilize them to explain a very large spectrum of industrial phenomenon.”

Despite being centred on industrial manufacturing and how a very generic manger (Alex Rogo) of a very generic factory (UniWare) uses the help of a physicist friend turned business consultant to turn his widget manufacturing plant around from near closure to super profitability in little more than three months, the book’s ideas are applicable to any process which contains less physical ‘dependent events’, ‘statistical fluctuations’, ‘throughput’, ‘inventory’ and ‘operational expenses’.

“What is the goal of your business, Alex?” asks the fictional Goldratt (Jonah), before helping him reach the conclusion that the goal of every business is actually very simple: to make money.

Given this self-evident fact which so often gets caught up in the hectic, day-to-day confusion of small (and I imagine large) business reality, productive activity is defined as anything which helps you to make money.

If something doesn’t help you to make money in your business, start looking for ways to get rid of it or change how you do those activities.

The main thing to look out for are the fat Herbies in your system. Herbies are the main constraints, the narrowest bottlenecks, the slowest kids in line. The theory goes that your whole system can only go as fast—and, very importantly, no faster—than the fattest Herbie in your line.

Herbie is the name of the fictional slowest fat kid in line in a Scout troop march Rogo goes on with his son for a few chapters.

Rogo the dad realises that if he sticks slow, fat Herbie at the front of the line instead of at the back, the statistical fluctuations (distance, time) between dependent events (kids in the line) will be as small as they can be and the line will move quicker—as a complete line—than if the strong, fast, competent kid is allowed to lead from the front—which will result in an enormous backlog of kids stretched far out along the trail.

Back at work, Rogo the factory boss teaches the Scout troop lesson learnt over the weekend to an initially skeptical group of seasoned factory managers and they apply the idea of fat Herbies to their production line, discovering that their metaphorical fat Herbie is a particular robot on the line—the NCX 10.

Theory of Constraints and blogging

I’m reading through The Goal for a second time and taking more notes but the area of my business I have found myself thinking about most whilst reading has been the blogging process.

Blogging is, after all, a process, and one which I’ve been having trouble using consistently this year (in terms of publishing regular posts). It has:

• dependent events: read, collect post ideas, decide on post topics, gather meta information, write post, translate, format post, publish post;
• statistical fluctuations: I can easily spend a couple of hours reading interesting articles, collecting a dozen post ideas, without writing anything at all;
• throughput: the number of posts you publish. This should according to the theory be equal to demand (how many blog posts do people want to read? What is demand for free blog posts on the Internet?);
• inventory: the stuff waiting to be processed but not yet a finished product (post). 200 articles collected, 30 post ideas, a few first drafts and then nothing else;
• operational expenses: my time mainly. How much time am I spending ‘blogging’ without actually producing any blog posts? (Answer: quite a lot, it seems).

And what is my blogging Herbie? Where is the slow, fat, wheezy kid on my blogging production line?

The actual writing of the posts, I think. If I take an hour and a half block of time and look at how much of each dependent event I can do in that time, the slowest thing to do is ‘write a post’.

All the rest of the blogging process (article reading, post idea generation, story analysis, proof reading, publishing stuff and even translation) can be done quicker than the actual writing of the first draft.

In 1.5 hours, depending on the type of post, I could write between one and three decent posts. In the same time I could translate more posts, come up with many more ideas for posts and prepare lots of posts for publishing. But not if I haven’t written them.

The Goal then advises you to metaphorically stick fat Herbie at the front of the line—even if you can’t actually physically move him to the front of your process line.

In my case, there must be some reading and thought about what to write about before the actual writing, but almost everything else can be done after the first draft.

Does it work? Well, this is the first post in over a month now and there’s a new system in place which should help me get more regular posts published over the next few days and weeks. Time will tell.

How could you apply Goldratt’s ideas about dependent events, goals and fat Herbies to your business right now?