Theory of Constraints

Like 80/20 on steroids for new products

Almost everyone’s heard of the 80/20 rule. Unfortunately, few really understand what it can do to improve the focus of their businesses – even in the area of new product innovation. You only have to look to all of the project multi-tasking that goes on to know how true this is. Boiling 80/20 down to the [...]

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How TOC can be an easier sale

It’s rare to find an exec who hasn’t read Goldratt’s The Goal, while few have read Ohno’s Toyota Production System, or anything at all on Six-Sigma. But few companies have adopted TOC as a focusing approach while Lean and Six-Sigma are widely used. Arguably, Theory of Constraints is a poor description from a marketing perspective. Some [...]

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The allure of doing it all

The single biggest problem companies struggle with in both creating and executing growth strategy is having too many priorities at the same time. Even after elaborate prioritization exercises, the natural inclination is to want to figure out how to work on them all. As a result, both execution speed and quality suffer. But early on, [...]

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Flipping the switch on innovation

While Kotter’s “Leading Change” is still a favorite and one of the most comprehensive works on change, I give authors Chip and Dan Heath high marks for this contribution to the field with ”Switch – How to Change Things When Change is Hard.” Organizational and personal change is a complex subject, but the Heath brothers offer [...]

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In memory of a true leadership hero – Eliyahou M. Goldratt

On June 11th, 2011, the world lost Eli Goldratt – a true leadership hero. Many call him a management visionary because of his Theory of Constraints – a management and improvement focusing approach that in retrospect most see as “just common sense.”  A fact that he accepted as praise. But, or maybe in addition, I [...]

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On the value of new technology

This is the second installment in a series of posts by Eli Schragenheim on how Theory of Constraints can contribute to the quantification of the value a new technology can bring to new product applications. It builds on the first which covered how to choose a project. The relevancy of the perception of value to [...]

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Problematic decision-making areas in managing new product projects

Employing the generic thinking of the Theory of Constraints, the methodology of scheduling and execution control of single projects has been developed under the name of Critical Chain Project Management.  That methodology also has been expanded for managing multi-project environments.  However, TOC has not, so far, contributed much to other areas of critical decisions regarding [...]

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Should money be your company’s goal?

The Theory of Constraints holds that “the goal” of for-profit businesses is normally to make money both now and in the future. That’s certainly the case for most companies that I work with. But not always – there are successful businesses where money is not the goal. Note here that I’m talking about goals – [...]

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Doubling speed to market: the TOC approach – Part 2

If you haven’t had the chance to check it out yet, Joe Dagger’s Business 901 blog focuses on applications of Lean principles to marketing. But I had the chance to appear on his Business 901 podcast to talk about applying TOC’s continuous improvement approach to innovation. Yesterday I shared Part 1. Today in Part 2 [...]

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Doubling speed to market: the TOC approach – Part 1

I recently had the pleasure of doing an interview on increasing new product throughput by applying Theory of Constraints to the innovation process. It was for Joe Dagger’s Business 901 podcast.  Joe normally focuses on applying Lean methodologies to marketing, but he’s big on the subject of innovation and has recently been expanding his reach [...]

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