Critical Chain - Eliyahu M. Goldratt [38]
He turns back to his volunteers. "You are still the bottleneck. You can produce maximum ten units an hour. And you are still the non-bottleneck, you can easily do twenty an hour, but whatever you do must pass through him. Everybody, again, how much should he produce per hour?"
By now everybody likes his dynamic style. "Ten," they all roar.
"Really?" He cocks his head slightly, still looking at them. "Do you really mean it?"
"Yes." Everybody is confident.
"And I thought that you liked this gentleman." He turns directly to Pullman. "Imagine that you are a worker in your own company. And you produce only ten units per hour when you can easily produce twenty. What will be your recorded efficiencies?"
Understanding starts to spread on Pullman's face. "Low," he says. Then, clearing his throat, "My efficiency will be fifty percent."
"And if your efficiencies are only fifty percent, what will happen to your head?" And smiling, he moves his hand across his neck.
When the laughter quiets somewhat, Johnny continues, "And everybody here told you to produce only ten. Your friends probably want to turn you into a kamikaze. Some friends."
Johnny is smiling. The laughter reaches new heights.
He waits patiently. "Do you understand what we have seen here? Your intuition is in the throughput world and in this world the answer is ‘don't dare to produce more than ten.' But your systems are in the cost world. Your systems want him to reach maximum local efficiency; they want him to produce twenty." He pauses.
"And there is no compromise. If this gentleman produces fifteen, both worlds will kill him."
The message is serious, but everybody laughs.
"So what will he do? He will slow down. He will claim that he cannot produce more than, let's say, twelve, which he will. We forced him to lie, because if he doesn't, his job security is threatened."
Slowly Johnny goes back to the podium. He stands there awhile before resuming his lecture. "Everybody knows that the first step in solving a problem is to define it precisely. The strange thing is that in spite of this realization, we didn't bother defining what we mean by ‘defining a problem precisely."'
He notices that not everybody understands, so he clarifies. "When do we know that we have defined a problem precisely? When we have already solved it, and looking back we agree that the stage when we defined the problem precisely was a major step forward. But how do we know that we defined the problem precisely before we solved it?"
"He has a point," Rick says to Jim.
"TOC adopts the definition accepted in the accurate sciences. A problem is not precisely defined until it can be presented as a conflict between two necessary conditions."
He pauses to let his peers digest.
"That's what we have done for the last half an hour." He goes back to the overhead projector and inserts a transparency.
"The objective of managers is to manage well. In order to manage well, one of the necessary conditions is to control cost and the other is to protect throughput. But in order to control cost, managers must manage according to the cost world, while in order to protect throughput they must manage according to the throughput world, and as we saw, these two are in conflict.
"What do we do? We try to find a compromise. And if there isn't one? Life is a bitch.
"Is there any other way? Do they do anything differently in the accurate sciences?"
Everybody waits for Johnny to supply the answer.
"For example," Johnny tries to clarify his point, "suppose that they try to measure the height of a building. Using one method they find that the height is ten yards, and using another the answer comes out to be twenty yards. A conflict. Do you think that they will try to compromise? That they will say that the height of that building is fifteen yards?"
Everybody is grinning.
"In the accurate sciences, what do they do when they face a conflict? Their reaction is very different than ours. We try to find an acceptable compromise. This thought never crosses