Theory of Constraints - awesome !!!!

I should admit i am someone who hates to read books, but give me a laptop i can be online for hours, i can read e-books, i can flip thru pdfs, word docs, html pages for hours. I dont mind, but i do not have the patience to read books.

So i generally seek for electronic versions of books, or websites.

One of my close friends asked me to read this book, Theory of Constraints by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. The name sounded quite interesting to me, again as i told i hate books so i went and grabbed an audio book so that i can listen daily on my 45 minutes drive to work.

It has worked out really good, i started liking it.

Usually i listen to tamil songs or my favourite boston kiss 108. So i changed and started listening to audio books.

Well i thought i might get so involved that i may bang in to an SUV or get banged in to.
But it does seem to work out very well.

So here is a gist of what i liked and what i did not like in TOC.

Basically what it is summarizing is,

1. What is the real power of the technology?
2. What limitation does it diminish?
3. What old rules helped accommodate the limitation?
4. What are the new rules that should be used now?
5. In light of the change in rules, what changes are required to the technology?
6. How to cause the change (the new win/win business model)?

To say frankly i quite did not understand the authors accent, it was tough in the beginning but later got used to it (eliyahu is an israel born physicist who became a business consultant)

But he is amazing.

Few things i liked today:

1) Nobel prize winner:
I was suprised to know that a noble prize winner had to submit a 3 page synopsis of his achievement and Eliyahu says how do you find out if it is a noble prize winner or not.
If any other physicist in the world reads the paper and if he says 2 words then it means it is a noble prize winner. So what are those 2 words?

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"Oh Shit!!!!"

lol - it basically means the other physicist forgot to find it before someone else did.

2) Pay people to keep them idle:
Well in many companies (s/w ) bench is considered a sin, leave about onsite guys (getting paid or not in bench) is a different story. Many s/w companies do have lots n lots of resources idle and in bench.

Eliyahu was referring to assembly lines and prod units, about lead time, JIT, inventory mgmt, etc he also refers to software development.

He says it is ok to have people to idle and build a huge backlog of tasks which they can work on when they find time.

One thing which really impressed me was this,

He asks tell me one profession where we pay them to be idle, if they are not idle then it means it is not good. If they are busy it is not good for the profession.

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The answer is fire service professional. As long as they are idle it is ok but if they are busy 24 X 7 it means the entire city is on fire :)
I liked it.

If you are more interested refer this link,
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0884271668/ref=sib_dp_pt/104-3454683-1203160#reader-link

It has lot of useful information for project management too.