Eliyahu M. Goldratt Quotes
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So this is the goal: To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.
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Why not make the work easier and more interesting so that people do not have to sweat? The Toyota style is not to create results by working hard. It is a system that says there is no limit to people’s creativity. People don’t go to Toyota to ‘work’ they go there to ‘think’.
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You forced us to view production as a means to satisfy sales. I want to change the role production is playing in getting sales.
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If any organization was built for a purpose and any organization is composed of more than one person, then we must conclude that the purpose of the organization requires the synchronized efforts of more than one person.
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So I’ve got limits on how fast I can go—both my own (I can only go so fast for so long before I fall over and pant to death) and those of the others on the hike. However, there is no limit on my ability to slow down. Or on anyone else’s ability to slow down. Or stop. And if any of us did, the line would extend indefinitely. What’s happening isn’t an averaging out of the fluctuations in our various speeds, but an accumulation of the fluctuations. And mostly it’s an accumulation of slowness—because dependency limits the opportunities for higher fluctuations. And that’s why the line is spreading. We can make the line shrink only by having everyone in the back of the line move much faster than Ron’s average over some distance.
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Putting it precisely, activating a resource and utilizing a resource are not synonymous.
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I sit there marveling that we’re going to reduce the efficiency of some operations and make the entire plant more productive.
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But when the nature of the constraint has changed, one would expect to see a major change in the way we operate all non-constraints.
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Never let something important become urgent.
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What are we asking for? For the ability to answer three simple questions: ‘what to change?’, ‘what to change to?’, and ‘how to cause the change?’ Basically what we are asking for is the most fundamental abilities one would expect from a manager. Think about it. If a manager doesn’t know how to answer those three questions, is he or she entitled to be called manager?
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The most demanding assumption that TPS makes about the production environment is that it is a stable environment. And it demands stability in three different aspects.
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I’ve got the machines. I’ve got the people. I’ve got all the materials I need. I know there’s a market out there, because the competitors’ stuff is selling. So what the hell is it?
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All those calls and meetings were fire fighting. I remind myself. No fires, no fighting. Now, everything is running smoothly— almost too smoothly.
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There is an explanation to these companies’ failure to implement Lean; an explanation that is apparent to any objective observer of a company like Hitachi Tool Engineering. The failure is due to the fundamental difference in the production environments. When Taiichi Ohno developed TPS, he didn’t do it in the abstract; he developed it for his company. It is no wonder that the powerful application that Ohno developed might not work in fundamentally different production environments.
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I smile and start to count on my fingers: One, people are good. Two, every conflict can be removed. Three, every situation, no matter how complex it initially looks, is exceedingly simple. Four, every situation can be substantially improved; even the sky is not the limit. Five, every person can reach a full life. Six, there is always a win-win solution. Shall I continue to count?
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While they go get the others, I figure out the details. The system I’ve set up is intended to "process’’ matches. It does this by moving a quantity of match sticks out of their box, and through each of the bowls in succession. The dice determine how many matches can be moved from one bowl to the next. The dice represent the capacity of each resource, each bowl; the set of bowls are my dependent events, my stages of production. Each has exactly the same capacity as the others, but its actual yield will fluctuate somewhat.
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We had physical constraints that helped us to focus our attention, to zoom in on the real policy constraint. That isn’t the case in the division. Over there we have excess capacity going through our ears. We have excess engineering resources that we succeed so brilliantly in wasting. I’m sure that there is no lack of markets. We simply don’t know how to put our act together to capitalize on what we have.
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If synchronized efforts are required and the contribution of one link is strongly dependent on the performance of the other links, we cannot ignore the fact that organizations are not just a pile of different links, they should be regarded as chains.
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Whenever we think we have final answers progress, science, and better understanding ceases.
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What was the nature of the answers, the solutions, that Jonah caused us to develop? They all had one thing in common. They all made common sense, and at the same time, they flew directly in the face of everything I’d ever learned. Would we have had the courage to try to implement them if it weren’t for the fact that we’d had to sweat to construct them? Most probably not. If it weren’t for the conviction that we gained in the struggle—for the ownership that we developed in the process—I don’t think we’d actually have had the guts to put our solutions into practice.
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Eli Goldratt passed away at his home in Israel on June 11th, 2011, in the company of his family and close friends.
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In order to significantly increase sales we have to increase the perception of value of the market for our products.
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Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum set of assumptions that can explain, through a straightforward logical derivation, the existence of many phenomena of nature.
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I reach for my briefcase, take out a yellow legal pad and take a pen from my coat pocket. Then I make a list of all the items people think of as being goals: cost-effective purchasing, employing good people, high technology, producing products, producing quality products, selling quality products, capturing market share. I even add some others like communications and customer satisfaction. All of those are essential to running the business successfully. What do they all do? They enable the company to make money. But they are not the goals themselves; they’re just the means of achieving the goal.