What’s this, another “newest, highest” priority?

I’ve been reading Goldratt’s “The Goal” lately—a tale about lean manufacturing. Well, that and working on a secret project I’ll tell you about soon.

At the end of the book, he talks about a workplace problem where:

1. We seem to be trying to do too many things at once

2. Priorities are “high,” “highest,” and “right now!”

3. We’re always missing deadlines

4. Management’s job is to go around and fix all the traffic jams and misprioritizations

5. We try to pad our work with additional time to do all this, and that just seems to make it worse!

Does this sound familiar?

“The Goal” is about operations research — how we work together and what patterns emerge from working together well and not-so-well.

If you experience the above problems, “The Goal” has identified your cause: pursuing 100% utilization rather than throughput.

These are operations research terms, so I’ll translate them.

Rather than focusing on getting value out the door, you are focusing on keeping everyone busy.

How do you fix this?

Rather than focusing on “what needs to be worked on” as your driving ethos, always ask, “Where’s the next dollar of revenue coming from?”

(Or cost savings or productivity. Either way, think of where the next good thing is coming from rather than where you will spend resources).

Spend any resources — no matter how small — on this next step. Then wash, rinse, repeat. “No matter how small?” you might be asking. Yes! Get out of the mindset that big ideas need big spending. Get out of the mindset that you’ve done a good job by keeping everyone busy. If your entire team is busy, you’ve done a bad job!

The purpose of a firm is to not extract labor out of people! Labor on its own is worthless. (And thinking labor for its own sake is valuable is Marxist, believe it or not.)

Labor is often a necessary cost to generate value—the value you want to create! Stop trying to keep people busy. People being idle will not bankrupt you; not making money will.

Trying to keep people busy and hoping value will come out is pushing on a string—it doesn’t work. Start with value first, and only spend what you have to. Don’t intentionally spend everything you have just to keep people busy.

What about Yourself?

Okay, you’re convinced — this is how to run a team or a firm. But how can you apply this advice to yourself?

If you start your day by arranging your schedule and trying to remove any gaps, you’re already planning how you’ll spend your resources to stay as busy as possible. STOP.

If your day has already been planned for you—wall-to-wall meetings—stop.

Instead, start your day by thinking about what could be created that adds the most value, and only spend your time, if necessary, on that one thing.