Comments on Goldratt video _Basics of Theory of Constraints_

In this video Goldratt starts out talking about that he was asked to write the intro to a TOC manual. He wanted to write one sentence that could be used to derive all of TOC. Then he decided to make it one word -- FOCUS.

Goldratt says that (my paraphrase): 

• Regarding the 80/20 rule (or Pareto principle)...
• The point of the principle is this: to illustrate that not all the things you could put effort in will provide equal amount of results.
• The rule only applies if the points in the system are not interdependent. And Pareto said this but people ignored him. For an interdependent system, the situation gets more extreme to the point that only 1 thing is responsible for all the profit. (probably butchering what he said)
• my note: It's super common for people to adopt a principle without understanding its scope (or more generally that principles have scope), and then misapply that principle to situations outside its intended scope.
• Regarding the "prevailing notion" that when you see something beneficial, doing more of it is better:
• More is better, only if it's a bottleneck. For non-bottlenecks, more is better up until a threshold, and then more is worse after that threshold.
• The threshold is determined by the interdependencies between the bottlenecks and non-bottlenecks.
• So you can't figure out the threshold when you are looking at a non-bottleneck in isolation.
• Therefore, for the vast majority of a system, which are the non-bottlenecks, local optima =/= to the global optima.
• Focus - do what should be done AND don't do what should not be done.
• Cost accounting (at least the way business people understand it) incentivizes people to focus on non-bottlenecks.
• The original article explaining cost accounting explained it's scope and warned against what conditions would make it break (not be useful for it's purpose of generating more profit). 
• my note: that god damn ignoring-scope mistake again. 
• looks like a cargo-culting mistake too. like somebody invents a great new idea and starts applying it. others copy it without really understanding how it works, and so they copy it all wrong.
• People misinterpreted his idea of "process of ongoing improvement" and he contributed to the misinterpretation. 
• He showed a graph of performance over time and 2 curves on that graph. Both curves are in positive growth, but the red is accelerating and the green curve is decelerating. Eli says most people think the green curve is more realistic. That's ridiculous. The history of economic activity is an accelerating curve, not a decelerating one.
• Eli asked presidents of companies this question and many of them answered "green is the more realistic" despite their own companies doing the red curve.
• The green curve is stagnation.
• The financial performance (or growth performance) should follow the red curve.
• The stability performance should follow the green curve.
• part of stability is the creation of buy-in by the people involved. 
• There's no end to improving stability. 
• He recognized a problem, which is that TOC produced such vast knowledge, even within one company that implemented it, that it was too hard for people to understand without many misinterpretations resulting in no longer seeing the expected results of TOC implementation.
• He wanted a way to organize the body of knowledge such that transferring the knowledge to a new person would be successful.
• FUCK! I thought he was going to say what his solution was but the video ended without it.

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 25

Chapter 25

He hesitates. He thinks about how to bring it up, if at all. These people have done an exceptional job, and he doesn't want to say anything that will be interpreted as criticism.

why not? I guess because he thinks the criticism will be misinterpreted as like insult rather than explanation about ways the already good ideas can be improved even further.

“I'm going to spend the rest of the week with the team putting up our new facility here. I certainly can and will use what you have taught me," Don prepares the stage. "Let me ask your advice. Knowing project team leaders, they are going to ask for additional investments."

"Without a doubt," Rick agrees.

"Suppose they ask me for an additional ten million dollars for something that will help us start operations three months earlier. How should I evaluate it?"

"I'm sure that by adopting what we've talked about you can cut more than three months, without any additional investments," Rick says confidently.

"You are probably right," Charlene agrees, "but the question still holds. Suppose that an additional investment can bring forward the completion time of a project, how does one go about evaluating whether or not to invest?”

Seems easy. As a first approximation, consider the expected ROR of the project in order to estimate the amount of extra profit that would happen if the investment were made and if that resulted in shaving 3 months off the project. This assumes that all other things are equal. So like if the investment causes the critical chain to change, then all bets are off.

The rest of the chapter is fucking awesome! But I don't really get how to apply it to how I think about various things. This is going to need a lot more thought.

“Suppose you have a field scattered with rocks..."

"How can we evaluate the efforts? We have to know the weight of each rock and the distance of each rock from the nearest border of the field. The effort to remove one rock is represented by multiplying the weight of the rock times the distance to the nearest border. Something we don't have a name for. The effort to clean the entire field is the summation of those multiplications.”

So effort (E) can be described as:

E = the sum of a series of products where each product has 2 elements, the weight of a rock and that rock's distance to its nearest border.

So effort has the dimensions weight-distance.

Similarly, we can do the same thing with investment. So investment (I) can be described as:

I = the sum of a series of products where each product has 2 elements, the amount of money invested and the amount of time that that money was invested.

So investment has the dimensions money-time.

The same logic can be applied to non-monetary things like the effort to read a book in order to learn new things that you think will help you in the future. So this sort of effort (E) can be described as:

E = the sum of a series of products where each product has 2 elements, the amount of time spent reading during a book-reading session and the amount of time elapsed from the start of that time-investment to now (or some future point). 

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 23 & 24

Chapter 23

There's a meeting between BJ the president and the professors. They are reading a report that has comments from companies about why they don't want to send their managers to the university's executive MBA program.

One guy suggests attaching payment to production -- university only gets paid tuition after the student-manager makes the company $100,000.

the president seems to like the idea. 

Chapter 24

This chapter gets back to the problem of dealing with a shared point between multiple critical chains (different projects) whereby that shared point is a bottleneck for all the projects. 

... "Resource contention means that the same resource is supposed to do two different steps at the same time," he wastes our time defining a term that is clear to us. "Removing resource contention between two steps," he continues methodically, "necessitates, many times, postponing one of those steps. The problem is that, as we discussed at length, there is no clear way to decide which step to postpone. It is almost an arbitrary decision."

“I like the way he's approaching it. In order to force him to continue, I prod, "The same is true within one project. Why is it a bigger problem when the steps belong to two different projects?"

“Because two project leaders are involved," he confidently answers. "It's not like you work in one domain, where it doesn't matter which step you move. Here each project leader will naturally fight that the step to be postponed will not be his."

That's stupid. The 2 project leaders could be having meetings with their shared boss. The 3 of them could come to agreement on what to do with the shared resource that the 2 project leaders are competing for. Maybe the boss knows something that helps decide which project should get the shared resource first. And that's something that potentially the 2 project leaders already know, in which case they could have made the decision without the boss.

“To cut a long story short, we squeezed agreement," Fred summarizes days of fierce arguments into one sentence.

that is, agreement about the order in which the shared resource is used by the competing projects. 

“Mark doesn't wait long. "Did you ever see a step that finished somewhat late?" He gives them a clue. "One small deviation in one step and BOOM-you get the domino effect, contentions all over the place. We found ourselves wasting all our time sorting out fights. Ted, you called it a nightmare? You are absolutely right."

This was discussed earlier in the book, I think a couple times. If you're getting the domino effect after one step finishes late, then maybe the problem is that you don't have enough capacity in all the non-bottlenecks such that none of them become the bottleneck. 

This is weird. Systems should be designed such that the designer chooses which point is the bottleneck. And if that point becomes a non-bottleneck, that's an error -- an error between expectation and reality. The error should be corrected, both for the temporary situation and also for the longterm. Like fix it now, and then fix it so that it never happens again (or less likely to happen again).

Much of what the book has been talking about is scenarios where the system already exists and people are trying to figure out how it currently works (like figuring out which point is the bottleneck) and then they are trying to make the system work better given the current parameters (like, no extra machines, no extra people, no changes other then moving stuff and people around). 

But like another thing that could be done is you take the existing system, call it Sn (for system now), and you imagine a better system Sf (for system future). Sn is just moving stuff/people around to subordinate the non-bottlenecks to the bottleneck. This is a temporary/shortterm move. I think the longterm move should be to figure out a new system Sf which is just the old Sn's resources (stuff/people) plus some additional resources. Sf's design would do things like ensure that the point we want to be the bottleneck is the actual bottleneck. That means doing things like increasing capacity of the non-bottlenecks sufficiently such that they never become the bottleneck (not never, but like 99.5% chance of not happening). 

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 21 & 22

Chapter 21

No new info.

Chapter 22

“Suppose that on one of the noncritical paths we are so late that we have already exhausted the entire feeding buffer, and we have started to penetrate into the project buffer. On the critical path itself we are okay."

“In the situation Ruth just described, isn't it true that the critical path has changed?" Fred answers. "That now the critical path starts at the operation where we have the problem?"

That's like saying that something can happen such that the current bottleneck switches to some other point. And I guess, by the same logic, the critical path can change such that one or more of the points on the new critical path used to be a point on the old non-critical path.

... "We put feeding buffers only where a noncritical path merges into the critical path. Changing the critical path will necessitate changing the location of many feeding buffers."

“No!" Ted responds too hastily. The thought of rearranging everything every time we face a serious delay on a noncritical path scares him. It scares me too.

That sounds like being in emergency mode. So I think that means that when the emergency is over, the old critical chain resumes. Or maybe it's better say it like this: apply the new critical chain logic until the old critical chain resumes -- this defines the moment that the emergency is over.

“If we don't do it," Ruth continues, "we're ignoring reality. Let's face it, whether or not we like it, right now the critical path does start at step N. And this path is not protected from disruptions in other paths by feeding buffers. It is also not protected by resource buffers. So the chance of recovery is reduced. On the contrary, there is a good chance that the delay will intensify. Don't you realize that we must rearrange the project?"

They discuss why they can't just change things around to account for the new critical path. 

“Because, at least in my case, the critical path has started to jump all over. Every few days I have this problem. Frankly, I am about to give up."

I guess you can control the critical path by doing things like ensuring that some particular point has plenty of capacity such that it never becomes a bottleneck (never becomes a point on the critical path). I don't mean never. I mean more like 99.9% chance of not happening.

“It's frantic. Noncritical paths, where everything was fine, where the feeding buffers had not been touched, are starting to, all of a sudden, be a problem."

I think this is to be expected given the situation. The situation is this: you have a functioning system. you find the bottleneck and increase capacity there. That increases throughput of the system. So let's say that meant shaving off 1 month from the project estimate. That would put pressure on the system such that a new bottleneck could arise. But that's not a negative symptom of bad things going on. It's a positive symptom of great things happening. 

Maybe I was confused but the discussion seems to have switched from a one critical chain issue to the issue mentioned in previous chapters about multiple projects, each one with it's own critical chain, whereby they share a point on their critical paths.

“How are we going to ensure that steps done by limited resources will not be scheduled in parallel?" Ruth is concerned.

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 19 & 20

Chapter 19

Most of this chapter is boring. It ends with something interesting. Something from a previous chapter.

The problem is this: one company, doing multiple projects, where all of those projects use a shared resource, and (if I understood correctly) that shared resource is a bottleneck for each of the projects. So there are multiple critical paths (one for each project), and all of those critical paths have a shared point, a bottleneck.

Chapter 20

The chapter starts out continuing the storyline about the MBA students figuring out the cost of delay in their project.

“There is no penalty for our company being late. On the contrary, it helps us." "How come?" Aggressively, he answers.

"Let me tell you the full story. At the time we sign the contract, our prices are very low. Competition is so fierce that we don't have any choice. You can win or lose a bid on a three percent difference in price. Everybody is cutting everybody else's throat.

"Where do we make our money?" He pauses for a second as if waiting for me to answer.

I don't know the answer.

"On the changes!" And then he elaborates. "Our motto is, the client is always right. They want changes, we won't argue, we'll gladly do them, the more the better. But at this stage we are not afraid that our dear client will turn to our competitor, so they pay. Handsomely." Ted looks as if he has just revealed the secret of his trade.

So there's an incentive for these companies to bid low, knowing that the bid price isn't the full revenue because things will be added later.

“Before I give up, I try to understand more about his business environment. "Aside from the money you overcharge for the changes, what is the damage to your client of having the buildings ready three months late?"

"I don't know, but isn't that his problem?”

It is his problem, but if you can solve it, then you potentially have something you can use to win bids over your competitors.

“Actually, I can give you more than one example where a three-month delay bankrupted a developer." Smiling, he adds, “Thank God it's not our problem. We get paid one way or another... I think."

 “After a moment of silence, he says, "You might have a point. I'd better check how much money we lost because developers went bankrupt. As a matter of fact, their tight cash flow affects us all the time. They delay their payments to us."

So the effect on their client actually does have an effect on them. If they go under, they don't pay the rest of the unpaid balance of the bid.

But also, I think reputation should be considered. If your company delivers late, and then your client goes under, I think that would have an effect on your company's reputation -- doing a deal with you makes companies fail due to your slow delivery times. That negative reputation will lead less demand for your company's work. That means you'll have to lower your bids even more than you've done in the past, which means lower profits. So then there will be incentive to accept changes (to get extra revenue), resulting in more delays. Sounds like a downward spiral into bankruptcy. 

“One way to 'encourage' a contractor to reduce lead time is to attach big bonuses to early completion and big penalties to delays."

Yeah I mentioned the possibility of attaching big penalties to delays in an earlier blog post about an earlier chapter. A bonus for finishing earlier makes sense too, at least in this scenario regarding construction.

“There are some bids that have small bonuses, but nothing like what Johnny is talking about. But the bonuses are not the problem; penalties are. "Show me a contractor," I say, "who would agree to penalties, even small ones. Their margins can't support it. What do you want? That they'll go bust?"

“Not at all. But Rick, imagine a contractor who knows he can deliver three months faster than anybody else."

“Look, contractors know about future projects well ahead of time. They have their connections, and updated lists periodi-cally appear in their professional magazines. What a fast contractor has to do is get in touch with a developer before a formal request for proposal is out. Contractors usually have good connections with several developers, so it shouldn't be a big problem. And then, all our fast contractor has to do is persuade the developer to put, in the request for proposal, a demand for relatively short lead times and hefty penalties."

Ah so the idea is to get the developer to adjust the bid request to be ideal for them (the contractor trying to win the bid) before the bid request is even made, causing the other competing contractors to shy away (cuz they don't understand the logic of it) and not even put in a bid.

“I see your point. If the request for proposal specifies relatively short lead times coupled with penalties, no other contractors will dare to bid. The developer will get a much higher return on his investment with much less risk, and the fast contractor will make much more profit." I smile at Johnny. "You are right after all. What contractors have now is not a win-lose, it's a lose-lose. The developers suffer from long and unreliable lead times, and the contractors suffer from a throat-cutting, price-sensitive market."

“And the contractor who realizes it can have a tremendous competitive edge," Johnny continues my thoughts. "Such a contractor could take the market while commanding good prices. The problem is that, like everybody else in projects, contractors think that they cannot do a thing to cut their lead times. The first ;ones to wake up will make a killing."

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 18

Chapter 18

“Thank you," I say. "Persuading people to collaborate is always necessary. The time when you could dictate is over. If you want people to think, to take initiative, you cannot dictate."

this raises 2 questions: 

• when was it ok to dictate?
• so at some point in the past, it made sense to expect people to think while dictating to them?

“Yes." And being Roger, he must add, "And whatever you say will not change it." He puts his head in his palm and shuts his eyes. I ignore him.

defeatist attitude. assumes that win/win interaction not possible. it seems like he's assuming that he knows everything I could say, and none of those things could persuade the suppliers, but I don't think that's what he's thinking. I think it's more like: even without knowing what I could say, he still thinks that all potential things I could say cannot possibly have the effect of persuading the suppliers.

“They can tell you whatever they want," Ted is almost shouting. "But the truth is, it's price. My company is a subcontractor. So I know. They may talk about reliability and quality, but when they come to sign, it's price."

But time is money. A delay can cause a financial loss that dwarves the financial "gain" from a lower price.

“While he thinks about it I turn to the class. "It is surprising, but unfortunately this is the case everywhere. Most people involved in a project don't explicitly recognize the penalties associated with each month that the project is delayed."

wtf

“I think Mark disagrees with her when he says, "Every project manager knows that it's important not to be late." But then he continues, "They know it because the pressure to finish on time is immense. But, as a project leader, I can tell you, they don't really know why. Until our executive vice-president explained it to the three of us, we didn't know. Maybe Fred did, but I didn't."

Yeah giving orders without making sure the orders are understood, including why that order should be done versus alternative potential orders, doesn't work well.

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 17

 Chapter 17

“Remember the criticisms we all had on the way we measure the progress of a project?"

"Yes. Vividly.”

Yes I remember. They measured project progress by taking the total time of the completed steps divided by the total time of the whole project (including the completed and the not yet completed) resulting in a completion percentage. This ignores the critical path.

“Well, we changed the way we measure progress. Progress for us is now measured only on the critical path; what percent of the critical path we have already completed. That's all we care about."

Oh cool. So you still do a completion percentage, but you only factor the steps along the critical path and no others.

They discuss another consequence of their new paradigm.

... "Mark, I understand all of that, but there must be something more. What actually are you doing differently?"

“Nothing." Then, as an afterthought, he adds, "But you have to realize that the whole attitude has changed. As I already stressed, there are no more false alarms. People don't put pressure on others just because their people do not have enough to do." Ruth steps forward. "There is another big difference. We don't have milestones anymore. It's not like it was before, when you knew you were supposed to complete your step in two weeks, so what's the rush. Now, it's different. Either you don't start a step, because it's too early, or, if a path is clear to be worked on, you work on it as fast as you can. You see, we trimmed the times to the extent that people are not sure anymore that they can finish the step on time. They don't dare procrastinate. I would say that the 'student syndrome' basically disappeared. Don't you think so, Mark?"

“Now it's different. We trimmed the times. Now people know that there is a fair chance that they will not finish the step on time. They fully understand why I'm concerned, why I came early to find out where they stand."

“That's makes sense," Ted concludes. "That will have an impact." Then he confesses, "I must say that only now do I see the human behavior aspect. I understood why we should trim the time estimate from a ninety percent chance of completing on-time to only a fifty percent chance, but only now do I see the full ramifications. In retrospect, it's obvious."

“Eliminating the false alarm and actually shrinking the time it takes to perform a step contributed a lot to the reduction of multi-tasking. People do not jump so frequently from task to task. There is much less nervousness. How much does it contribute to the shrinkage of the lead time? I don't know, but it must be substantial."

“How do you do that?" Ted is surprised. "This idea of resource buffer was the only thing out of what we said that I thought was totally impractical. Do you actually force a resource to do nothing one week before it's supposed to work on the critical path? And people go along with it?"

"No. We don't do it that way. A week before the expected time we just remind people that their work on the critical path is coming. Then three days ahead we give another reminder. And then again, one day before, when we know for sure that everything else is going to be ready. The important thing is that people know that when the time comes they must drop everything and work on the critical path."

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 16

Chapter 16

“I fooled myself long enough on answers that look good but are meaningless. What's the meaning of "don't waste the critical path?"

“Don't waste what?" I ask.

The safety? So like if a step finishes early, the person responsible for alerting the rest of the system should immediately and honesty claim that he's finished instead of the standard procedure of wasting that safety cushion. This allows the next step to get started earlier.

“So we have to protect the completion date of the critical path? Correct?"

"Yes."

We put all the safety at the end of the critical path. Stripping the time estimates of each step frees up sufficient time to create a 'project buffer.' " I draw two pictures to clarify what I just said. The original critical path and the critical path with the project buffer. That helps.

At last they settle on the following. The time allotted for each step will only be cut by one-half (Mark squeezes from them some lip service that they will try to beat these times). On the other end, the project buffer will not be equal to what they trimmed. It will be set to only half of it. Mark is adamant that two months is more than enough. I suspect that he insisted on it in order to put the project back on the promised date.

I see a parallel to a problem I ran into early in my business life. The problem is related to a phone system with multiple phone lines handling incoming calls such that the number of paying-customers that could call into the phone system is much larger than the number of people that would call into the phone system at any given moment. And part of the problem is that we don't want any calls to get a busy signal. I recall looking up a book in the library that solves this math problem (this was the most fun part of it!). I applied the formula (I don't recall it) and it worked well. The parallel I see to the book's concept is this:

• the old way of thinking about projects is that we should account for stuff messing up at each step, and add up those "deltas", and the resulting sum is the safety we want for the whole project. This reasoning treats things as if every single step will finish late, which is not true.
• the new way of thinking about projects is that we should account for the fact that some steps will finish on time or early and some steps won't. and we should think of like the average number of steps that might run long, and use those numbers to create the project safety. 
• the parallel to the phone system idea is this: we don't assume that all paying-customers will call into the phone system at the same time. instead we recognize that only some of the paying-customers will call in at the same time. and that amount can be calculated such that we guarantee say a 99% chance of no customer getting a busy signal. 

“Exploit the constraint," I start. "Don't lose any time on the critical path. We really can't do a good job of exploiting the constraint until we do the next step, until we subordinate everything else to it."

Ok I think I get it now. I answered wrong above. I said "The safety?" I think the answer is: don't waste the capacity at the bottleneck. If you can do that, then you've maximized the throughput of the whole system.

“Without subordination," I answer, "we are unable to protect the constraint from losing time due to problems occurring elsewhere."

... "Do you agree that we must do something about it? That somehow we must protect the constraint from problems occurring at the nonconstraints?"

They don't have any problem agreeing. Their problem is figuring out how to do it.

"What is done in production?" I ask. "How do they protect the bottleneck from problems occurring at the nonbottlenecks?”

“They build a buffer of inventory before the bottleneck."

The parallel to projects is this:

It doesn't take them long to conclude that we must insert a time buffer at the points where a feeding path merges with the critical path.

By now they have the formula. For each feeding path they decide to cut the original time estimates of the steps in half and use half of the trimmed lead time as a 'feeding buffer.'

... The 'feeding buffer' protects the critical path from delays occurring in the corresponding noncritical paths. But when the problem causes a delay bigger than the feeding buffer, the project completion date is still protected by the 'project buffer.'

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 14 & 15

Chapter 14

We find out that the professor didn't get tenure and was being let go. He met with the president to try to save his job/tenure. He suggests the idea of him bringing in more MBA students (acting as a sales man). He thinks he can do it cuz he made some progress on advancing the field of project management. She agrees to extend him one more year if he brings in 10 students.

-----

Chapter 15

ideas:

• in order to maximize throughput of a process that has a series of steps whereby each step in the series is dependent on the previous one finishing, each step must be preceded by a step that has more capacity than it (which means that the last step is designed to be the bottleneck). so capacity goes down as you move from earlier step to later step. 
• the extra capacity at a step needs to be enough such that the next step is 100% fully supplied by its supplying step.
• one major point here is that the bottleneck should be the last step.
• interesting thing: regarding the whole company, the last step is customer demand. that makes sense. customer demand should be the bottleneck.
• this reminds me of some basic business logic I learned a long time ago: don't do marketing when you're not even doing well at converting new customers into lifetime customers. why? I'll explain in two ways. 
• the old way is this: if your company's rate of converting new customers to lifetime customers is low or zero (let's use zero for easy math), then your marketing efforts are being used as a way to get one transaction from each customer. but instead if your rate of converting new customers to lifetime customers is high (let's use 100% for easy math), then your marketing efforts are being used as a way to get an entire lifetime's worth of transactions from a customer. so your marketing money per unit transaction is much lower with the second way. so the idea is to first build up the supply side of your company such that when you do spend marketing dollars, you get the most amount of effectiveness (profit) from it.
• the new way is this: first note that your bottleneck is not customer demand and instead your bottleneck is somewhere in the supply side (for example, something related to customer relations). so if you increase capacity at the demand point of the process, you're making an improvement that has little to no effect on throughput (profit). if you instead fix that bottleneck first, and then fix all the other bottlenecks that pop up after that, probably still on the supply side, then the bottleneck will be customer demand. and only then should you focus on marketing in order to increase capacity at that new bottleneck.
• safety = extra work-in-progress stock waiting before each production step = extra lead time before each project step
• the safety of a step allows for dependent steps to always be ready to start
• the safety of a step is there to protect against delays in the steps before it.

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 12 & 13

Chapter 12

This chapter talked about a steel company and how its people focussed on a metric (tons per hour), which drove them to go after local optima while sacrificing the global optimum.

To make a long story short, they became convinced that all the other problems were either relatively insignificant or were significant because of the existing chaotic environment. There was a real, true consensus that the core problem, the constraint of the company, was the fact that their prime operational measurement was tons-per-hour.

Don pointed out to them that this was actually very good news. Yes, very good news, because all their competitors suffered from exactly the same core problem. Correcting it would give this company a tremendous advantage.

even if the other companies didn't do this, it's good news.

----

Chapter 13

This chapter gets back to the problem of figuring out how much safety people put into their estimates.

“From my inquiries, one thing came out very clearly." And he makes the following declaration: "The time estimates are impacted, in a major way, by the last overrun the programmer had."

“Yes," says Mark. "We did force people to give their evaluations. We even prepared a questionnaire for that. It's in our report. As you can see there, except for one person who is known to be paranoid, the vast majority said they think that they have better than an eighty percent chance of finishing on time."

“There is a caveat to it," Ruth adds. "Almost everybody emphasized that their answer is dependent on others not delaying them, and not being loaded with too many other things at the same time."

... "I think that we did confirm what we said last time. We expected people to give estimates that would give a good chance of finishing their step on time, well over a fifty percent chance. And that's what you found. At the same time, we predicted that people would not realize how much safety this over fifty percent means, and you verified that as well. That basically sums up your findings."

"That's not all," Fred calmly says. "Mark, Ruth and I found something else. We found that five plus five equals thirteen."

“Whenever a step in a project is a collection of several tasks, each done by a different person," Ruth explains, "the boss of this project asks each person for their own estimates, adds them up and then adds his own safety factor on top."

so each step gets it's own safety. and then a collection of steps are combined into a single step, and that combining acts like a step too, needing it's own safety.

“There is something else," Fred adds. "In our environment, top management is frequently not happy with the final estimation of when a project is expected to be finished. They want the results sooner. So in half the cases, when all the estimates are done, they demand the lead time of the project be cut by, say, twenty percent. This global cut is usually translated into everyone, across the board, having to cut their times by twenty percent. By now everybody is used to it, so they inflate the final estimates by twenty-five percent to start with."

that's funny. it's similar to how in some cultures people are expected to come late to a scheduled social gathering and to deal with that sometimes people will lie about the starting time of an event, like they'll subtract an hour.

I turn to the board and draw two boxes. "Suppose these boxes represent two consecutive steps in a project. The estimated time for each step is ten days. Now suppose that the first step took twelve days. That means that the second step will start two days later than planned. That's obvious. But what will happen if the first step finishes in eight days?"

"Is it a trick question?" someone asks.

"If the first step finishes in eight days, when will the second step start?" I repeat my question.

A light is coming on in Ted's eyes. "It will start when it was originally planned to," he confidently states, and smiles.

“Why?”

"Because the team that finished ahead of time wont report it. You see, the way we are set up, there is no reward for finishing early, but there is, in fact, a big penalty." And he explains, "If you finish early you just invite pressure from management to cut the times. Your friends, in charge of other similar teams, will not like it, to say the least."

This reminds me of companies that pressure individual awesome workers to produce less so he doesn't make the other workers look bad. I guess they think other workers looking bad somehow worsens their productivity. 

... "We try to protect the performance of each step." That sounds to me like a cost world mentality. "The only thing that counts is the performance of the project as a whole." That sounds much more like the throughput world mentality. Is it possible that we are facing here the conflict that Johnny Fisher was talking about? Is it possible that bad performance is the result of a wrong assumption? What assumptions have we made?

skipping ahead...

“How can they," Mark agrees. "I think that their priority system is according to who shouts loudest. And every project has several people who know how to shout."

ugh. that's a very nasty way to set priorities. it's like a standard way people act, not just in business. I guess lacking rational prioritization methods means having to rely on irrational prioritization methods.

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 10 & 11

Chapter 10

The scene is the professor and Jim (forgot who he is) talking about topics for his articles.

They talk about the critical chain thing again and about when to start on the non-critical paths: early or late or what.

The discussion turns to the idea that the professor's idea is not a mathematical model and instead is a logical one and that academia does not publish that kind of thing. (boring)

Chapter 11

This chapter is about Theory of Constraints (TOC).

He moves back to the overhead projector and points to the second line. "The second, and most important breakthrough of TOC, at least in my eyes, is the research methods it introduces. Methods that were adapted from the accurate sciences, adapted to fit systems that contain, not just atoms and electrons, but human beings."

So TOC incorporates the scientific method into business management. Seems like an old idea.

“And the third breakthrough is, of course, the one TOC is known for the most, its broad spectrum of robust applications."

That's weird. It just says that the general theory was applied to many areas of business management resulting in "robust applications". It's weird to call the little stuff breakthroughs.

“My opinion is different," says another top manager. "I think that the real problem is how, exactly, we should go about inducing our people to improve. We hear so much about the importance of empowerment, communication, teamwork. At the same time we hear so little about how to actually achieve it."

Yeah there should be an underlying thing of people and systems getting better over time instead of staying stagnant.

A couple more ideas mentioned in this chapter:

• subordinate the non-bottlenecks to the bottleneck
• that means don't use all the capacity of the non-bottlenecks. only use as much as is necessary to use all the capacity of the bottleneck
• TOC includes the inherent simplicity concept (but without naming it) (at least not in this chapter)

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 9

This chapter's setting is the professor and his class again. They are talking about Gantt charts.

Then the professor asks about the critical path.

“The critical path," I remind the class, "determines the time it will take to finish the project. Any delay on the critical path will delay the completion of the project. That's why the project manager must focus on it."

That's what I had imagined "critical path" to mean as I was reading earlier chapters of this book. The points that are not part of the critical path are all the points that, if improvements or delays happened at those points, the whole project time doesn't change. (A long enough delay at a particular point could potentially change it from not being part of the critical path to being part of the critical path.)

Then they start talking about the non-critical paths and when it makes sense to start them -- at the earliest possible date or the latest or what?

Then someone suggests that it would be good to postpone the non-critical paths until latest possible date so that the project manager is not overwhelmed by too many things to focus on.

“Exactly," Ted bursts in. "So if we start everything on its late start, everything becomes important. And I'll have to concentrate on everything. Kiss focusing good-bye."

Yeah so if you start everything at it's latest start, then the non-critical paths become part of the critical path.

“Concentrating on everything is synonymous with not concentrating at all," I agree with him. "So where do we stand? If the project leaders use early starts, they will lose focus. If they use late starts, focusing is not possible at all. We have to find the mechanism, the rules, that will enable a project leader to focus."

moving on... 

“It's not long before we get a good handle on how progress is measured in reality. Not much different than what I found in the literature. Progress is measured according to the amount of work, or investment, already done, relative to the amount still to do. In all my students' cases, including the cases where milestones and progress payment were used, this measurement did not differentiate between work done on the critical path and work done on other paths.

ouch! what a bad way to measure project progress! it doesn't help anyone figure out whether they are on track to achieve goal success or goal failure.

“Can anybody predict the impact of measuring progress in this way?" I ask the class.

"We reward starting each path at the earliest possible time," Brian is quick to notice. "This measurement encourages the project leader to start unfocused."

"Moreover," Charlie notices, "it encourages the project leader to continue being unfocused."

"How come?"

"Because according to our measurement," he explains, "progress on one path compensates for a delay on another. So we encourage progressing fast on one path even though another path is delayed."

"What's bad about that?" Mark asks. "If I have difficulties in one path, why shouldn't I move on the other paths where I can?"

"At the end they all merge together," Charlie reminds him.

“All the advance that you gain in the open paths will have to wait for the delayed path anyway. You made the investment too early, and what is worse, you allowed yourself to not concentrate on the place you should, on the delayed path that needs your attention."

So the metric used incentivizes focussing on non-bottlenecks instead of focussing on bottlenecks.

This is similar to how people calculate an average by doing a non-weighted average when they should be calculating a weighted average. So like imagine driving from city A to city B at 60 miles/hour and then back to city A at 40 miles/hour and somebody asks what the driver's average speed was for the entire trip. Lots of people would say 50 miles/hour, incorrectly treating each leg of the trip with an equal weighting in the average calculation. If they correctly treated the 2nd leg as more weighted for the whole trip (since it takes up more time than the first leg), then they would have done a weighted average (resulting in a figure that is between 40 and 50).

This parallels the project management scenario in the book. Project managers are incorrectly treating each point in the path as equally weighted in determining goal success.

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 8

The book gets back to the issue of researching projects to study the safety of the steps.

He locates it quickly. "Okay. 'Due to budget overruns (sixteen point two percent) and delays in production, the original estimate of three years payback is now modified to five.' Typical. What's your point?"

"The budget overrun, being only sixteen point two percent, cannot possibly change the original estimate for the payback period by more than half a year."

"So?”

"But they had to increase the estimated payback period from three years to five. By the way, the person writing it is a project auditor and he claims that his friends are already pushing to change the official estimate to seven years."

Jim still doesn't get it. It's not like him. Patiently, I continue, "If the budget overrun can't possibly cause such a change in the payback period, it must be caused mainly by the delays in completing the project."

This was foreshadowed earlier in the book (chapter 6). It was said that in production, in contrast to projects, there's a lot of waiting in queues. 

“Yes, but that's because production is different," Fred argues. "In production, most of the time parts spend in the plant they are waiting in queues in front of machines, or waiting for another part in front of assembly. Most of the lead time is not actual production, it's in wait and queue. That's not the case in projects."

Continuing...

“In the same report," I don't give up, "it's indicated that they chose the cheap vendors over the more reliable ones. How much do you think they saved?"

"How do I know? Maybe five percent. Can't be much more."

"You can also see," I continue, "that delays in getting the machines from those vendors was the prime reason for the delay in completing the project.”

ugh. So they accepted a trade off. Get a 5% savings on the machines, while accepting an extra 2 years of added time to the whole project (from 3 years to 5 years). This is dumb as hell because the extra 2 years represents far more money than the 5% savings figure. The 2 years of extra time costs money in the form of 2 years worth of lost profits. Using hypothetical numbers, imagine a $100,000,000 dollar project with an expected rate of return of 15% and the 5% savings on the machines represents $3,000,000. The 2 year overrun constitutes a loss of profit of more than $30,000,000. What a crappy trade off.

This is the mentality that Goldratt talked about in other books: people routinely focus on optimizing parts while sacrificing the whole.

It's weird. A famous saying in America is "time is money", but it seems like these projects don't treat time as money.

Maybe overruns should be linked with extra fees. So like the customer would get extra fees if there's an overrun, helping recover their loss in the case of an overrun. And the company's incentives would better match the reality of the situation.

And the company's sales team could position themselves above the competition by guaranteeing no overruns or else hefty fees would be added. 

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 7

So in a previous chapter it's mentioned that maybe supply was increased beyond demand for MBAs and it was also suggested that maybe demand for MBAs has gone down. In this chapter it's revealed that in fact demand for MBAs is down.

At last she reached him. He cannot regard it any longer as a concern, as another item on the agenda. He knows she is right. Almost none of his friends consider an MBA important. He himself, when hiring managers, doesn't consider it as relevant anymore. Still…

"B.J., answer me just that. What is saving us from tar and feathers?"

"The respect for higher education," she answers in a lifeless voice. "Respect that is well-deserved by some of our departments but not by others."

It makes sense to him. His mind is racing now, trying to see the ramifications. "When organizations overcome the respect for a university degree the real collapse will happen. I wonder how many business schools will survive then. B.J., we must do something about it. We must save our business schools. They amount to half the university.”

The rest of the chapter is about talk of downsizing the business school.

I wonder why they aren't talking about changing their school such that people want to attend to learn how to do business. I guess that would help with a longterm strategy. And I guess that in the short term, a downsizing is in order. 

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 6

The scene is the classroom where the professor and students meet again to discuss their project management reports where they interviewed the people involved looking for official reasons and unofficial reasons for budget/time overruns.

So the first project management report identifies that the official reasons are all external factors (outside the company) and the unofficial reasons are all internal factors (inside the company). 

So here are the official reasons:

“Even better," I say, and continue, "One: Particularly bad weather conditions that delayed construction. Two: Unforeseeable difficulties experienced by the vendors who supply the machines. Three: Longer than expected negotiations with the Malaysian government concerning employment terms."

And here are the unofficial reasons:

“Unofficial reasons given by the project leader," I read. "One: Corporate forced an unrealistic schedule to start with. Two: It was dictated that we choose the cheaper vendors, even though it was known that they are less reliable. Three: In spite of repeated warnings, efforts to recruit and train plant personnel and workers started too late."

Interesting. Each of these unofficial reasons is connected to one of the official reasons. 

Official reason #1 was caused by unofficial reason #1. Bad weather delayed construction because corporate forced unrealistic schedule [that didn't properly account for expected bad weather].

Official reason #2 was caused by unofficial reason #2. Vendors didn't supply machines in time because corporate forced us to use vendors that we thought weren't good enough to supply machines in time.

I'm not clear on the relationship for the #3 reasons.

... "There is a pattern here. The lower the level of the person, the more the finger points internally, rather than externally. You'll find the same thing in my report."

The discussion turns to the idea that not accounting for uncertainty is the major problem. Then somebody says...

“So there's nothing anybody can do," is Charlie's conclusion. "You cannot force certainty on a situation that contains major uncertainties."

That's like saying that we can't learn about nature cuz we might be wrong, or we can't fix mistakes because we can't be sure that any particular mistake was fixed, or we can't do things to help ensure getting the right answer on a math problem because there's always the possibility that we get something wrong despite our best efforts. I'm reminded of numerical methods class in college; a big idea was that we can't remove all error but we can do things to reduce error.

So like say I regularly go to work at 9am and I know it takes 30 minutes to drive there. Lets say I don't want to be late. Let's say I know that sometimes there'll be a train that takes up upto 10 minutes, let's say 10% of the time. So I could leave my house 40 minutes before the meeting such that if I get stuck from the train, I'm still not late to work. So like it's uncertain on any given day whether or not I'll lose 10 minutes due to a train. But I'm reasonably certain that if I factor in 10 minutes for the train situation, I'll never be late to work due to losing 10 minutes from the train.

The rest of the chapter presents the problem of figuring out the amount of safety (time accounting for uncertainty) in the steps of a project and working out how that should be factored in to create a whole project estimate.

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 5

The scene involves BJ, the University Professor, and another guy named Chris Page talking about setting next year's budget.

They are discussing a previous instance of a university that saw a dip in demand and almost going bankrupt. It was agriculture. They think that their business school doesn't have that problem.

“Without a doubt. Today, if you want to climb the corporate ladder you must have an MBA."

Maybe that was already changing and could change dramatically soon enough.

Then BJ mentions a law school that is seeing declines in demand and that's an industry that requires law school by law, unlike business schools (no law requiring it).

“[Law schools] are facing a real problem, he told me. New student enrollments at their law school are less than half compared to three years ago."

BJ explains why there was a drop in demand.

“Being a lawyer became a real fad," she starts to explain. "No wonder, considering the base salaries that were being offered. There was a flood of young people wanting to be lawyers. The schools ballooned. Almost a replica of the story I told you about my old university."

... it's because demand was artificially high, and demand was just dropping to the reality.

“Being a lawyer became a real fad," she starts to explain. "No wonder, considering the base salaries that were being offered. There was a flood of young people wanting to be lawyers. The schools ballooned. Almost a replica of the story I told you about my old university."

This seems similar to lots of other things. People do stuff because lots of other people already are. Most people are not thinking in terms of supply and demand when they choose to go to school or choose a school program. Part of the problem is that government incentivizes going to school, which causes artificial increases in demand.

Page says that demand for MBA is not dropping.

It doesn't work. B.J. is not impressed. "Isn't the growth in enrollment at our business school the smallest it has been in years?"

That's a drop in demand!

"A temporary phenomenon," he dismisses it. "Nothing to worry about.”

How does he know? This sounds like someone just shutting his mind shut.

What he should do is look at those numbers to see if there's a trend in the dropping.

Page cannot afford to leave it like this. "B.J., how can I put your mind at rest about this?" He signals that he is ready for business.

This is a bad attitude. He's not even looking at this as if maybe he's wrong. He's only trying to convince her to his side. He should be trying to see both sides. He's biased to his side.

“I'm not concerned with the immediate future," she responds. "My nightmare is to be stuck with an expensive burden that will be almost impossible to trim. For example, vent are budgeting for tenure for eight more professors. If push comes to shove such decisions may kill us. What about putting a freeze on all tenure, at least until the situation becomes clearer?"

That's a good attitude and policy. And I think it's something that should be done every single year (or more often). 

“No, B.J., that would be a mistake. We need these people. If we don't give them tenure now, we have to let them go. Think of the implications. Think of the shock wave it would send. I understand your concerns, but, in my opinion, there is no reason for alarm. Definitely no reason for such drastic actions."

I don't understand why they have to wait to get the answers. It seems simple enough to figure out pretty quickly. 

“To his surprise she is not willing to counter-offer her number. "I'm still worried that what is happening in law schools can happen in business schools," she insists. "What are you suggesting we do about the possibility of a change in the trend?"

yeah bring the issue back to finding out whether or not this year's drop in demand is an anomaly.

“Exactly right," she sails along. "Do we agree that the first, decisive indications will appear as the ability of graduates to get jobs?"

ah yes. The next line in the chain after getting an MBA degree is getting a job (or a promotion I guess). So like find out if the percentage of conversions (from degree to job) is dropping over time.

“We don't have time for committees, Chris." Before he can object, she turns around and walks to her desk. "Here are the results of our new survey. I think you'll find it interesting. Even quite alarming. But once you study it, I'm sure you'll agree with me that we have to put a total freeze on granting more tenure."

oh shit, she already did the data collection and analysis of the issue of conversion from degree to job.

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 4

The settings circles back to the professor teaching his first class on project management.

An interesting exchange occurs between teacher and student...

As usual, the first row is almost empty. The last person to become quiet is sitting in the back row. Good. 1 le is a large: man, about my age. He can stand some abuse. "What's your name?" I ask, pointing at him.

I picked right because he doesn't try to pretend I am pointing at somebody else. "Mark Kowalski," he replies in a booming voice.

"Why have you chosen this course?" I ask bluntly. One thing is for sure, I have everybody's attention. They are not accustomed to my teaching style. A professor is supposed to lecture, not interview. Half are looking at me, half are looking at him.

This is similar to how Elliot talks to new people who join FI discord.

“I'm a project leader," he answers.

When I don't reply, he continues. "I work in a company that produces modems. I'm in charge of one of the development teams."

hehe, this is similar to how a lot of people reply to Elliot (not just to the above question). They don't answer the question. They say something else, seemingly hoping that the question-asker drops it.

I continue to stare at him, but he doesn't add anything more. The situation becomes really uncomfortable when I finally say, "You haven't answered my question."

That too is something Elliot says frequently (cuz people frequently reply to him without answering his questions and sorta acting like they answered).

I look around. Nobody meets my eye. Nobody wants to be the next victim. I return to Mark. "Do you have any problems managing your project?"

So the teacher is now guessing why the student is here.

“Not really," he answers.

“So why have you chosen this project management course?"

The teacher reasks his original question. 

He starts to grin. "I guess I do have some problems," he admits.

Finally an answer to the question, but he was answering the teacher's second question which was a yes/no question. The first question was harder to answer.

"Can you elaborate?"

 So now this is the teacher's 3rd question that is designed to get the answer to the 1st question.

“Well, I didn't start this project, and the person before me made some wild promises that, I'm afraid, are unrealistic."

Now we're getting somewhere. 

“Like?" I press him. 

"Like the expected performance of our new modem and the time it will take to deliver it.”

“And you expect," I look him straight in the eye, "that what you are going to learn in this course will enable you to perform some miracles?"

"I wish," he uncomfortably admits.

I guess this is sarcasm. The teacher reads it as I do too... [1]

"So, why have you chosen this course?" I repeat my question.

"Look," he says. "I am a project manager. I am working toward my MBA. This is a project management course, isn't it?"

"Ah! So you chose the course because its title resembles your job title?"

I'm not sure about this reply. I like it and dislike it. I like it for exposing that the students answer is junk. but it seems mean too. it's making fun of the student. maybe the same good point could have been made without being sarcastic. or maybe I'm wrong to care about the sarcasm cuz the students are a bunch of managers who wouldn't be harmed by this style.

He doesn't answer. What can he say? It's time to let him off the hook.”

“Can anybody tell me why he or she chose this course?" I ask the class.

Nobody answers. Maybe I was too intimidating.

"When I was a student," I tell them, "I chose courses that were given by professors who were known to be light on homework. I'm afraid that I'm not one of them."

the teacher seems to be doing a psych technique I recently heard about. Say something "embarrassing" about yourself to... I guess make the other people feel comfortable. 

It helps a little, but not much.

I think that's what "it helps" is referring to. It helps make the students feel comfortable. 

"Listen," I continue. "We all know that you are here to get the degree. To get a piece of paper that will help you climb the organizational ladder. But I hope that you want something more than that. That you want to get know-how that can really help you do your job."

Heads nod around the room.

"You have to choose between two alternatives. One is that I'll stand here, on the podium, and lecture for the entire semester. I can flabbergast you with optimization techniques and take you through every complicated heuristic algorithm. It will be tough to understand, even tougher to use and, I guarantee you, won't help you one iota.

“Or, we can put our heads together and, drawing from your experience and the know-how that exists in books and articles, we can try to figure out how to manage projects better. Which do you choose?"

Not much of a choice is it?

At the back, Mark raises his hand. "So what should I expect from this course?"

Good question. Good man. "Mark, you told us you have problems with your project. I think that this course should give you better ability to deal with those problems."

"Fine with me," he says.

skipping way ahead.... the chapter turns to a homework assignment regarding project management.

Heartlessly I continue. "Select a project in your company. A project that has recently finished [or is] about to be finished."

“Interview the person running this project-the project leader. Interview the people who did the actual work, and interview the bosses of the project leader. Prepare two lists for class. One: the official reasons for the overruns. The second: the unofficial reasons."

---------------

[1] rethinking this in relation to the previous question by the teacher. the teacher asked if he's expecting miracles. an answer of 'no' would have been fine. but I think an ok answer is to parallel the "miracle" part of the question. of course miracles are not possible, the teacher and student know that. so the student's reply (I wish) is 'in kind'. miracles and wishes go together. you wish for miracles (if you believe they exist).

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 3

Chapter 3

The chapter starts out by focussing on the University President.

There's an event where that president is talking to another university president. They're talking about how both of their universities are seeing less applicants to their business schools.

Alistair articulates what they are all thinking. "The last ten years or so were very good for us. Organizations' demand for new MBAs grew, and the desire of young people to acquire MBAs grew proportionately. We didn't have enough capacity to supply the demand. No wonder we enjoyed a hefty queue of applicants banging on our doors." He stops to sip his red wine.

..."So, is what we are witnessing now simply a result of the universities succeeding in building up enough capacity?

"Probably." Alistair's eyes are fixed on his glass. "But it is not as simple as that. You know how systems tend to react.

“They almost always undershoot or overshoot. I'm afraid that the rapid decline in the number of surplus applicants indicates that we overshot."

I guess that means they built up capacity at a bottleneck (supply) so much that it was no longer the bottleneck and another thing became the bottleneck (demand).

"This means that we had better restrain our business schools from continuing to grow at their current frantic pace. At least until we find ways to encourage more young people to choose management as a career path," Bernard thoughtfully concludes.

“It might be that we don't have enough applicants because we are already over-supplying the market demand and the word is out that an MBA degree doesn't guarantee a lucrative job anymore."

"If that's the case," Bernard wonders aloud, "then it's not simply a matter of slowing the growth of our business schools."

“The challenge is how to smoothly shrink them. That's tough."

They discuss other universities that don't seem to be having any trouble with this. Like Harvard. They turn down 4 out of 5 applications to their business school.

They discussed that their professors are better at teaching than the Harvard professors.

They conclude that it's reputation that is their problem. Harvard has it. They don't. That results in the best students going to Harvard.

They discuss how to build a strong reputation. One guys says...

“... We all know of cases where faculties have built national acclaim. They succeeded in gathering a group of exceptional scientists, whose breakthrough research put their department firmly on the map."

Alistair shakes his head in disagreement. B.J. knows exactly why. There is no way a small university like hers or Alistair's can attract people of such caliber. These exceptional people want, and are able, to go to the already acclaimed universities.

Anyway, she simply can't afford the high salaries they command.

Maybe she can cultivate talent already existing in her business school? Support and encourage them in some way… What way? And what is the likelihood that the business school has some unrecognized Feynman in their midst?

Sounds interesting!

Here's an idea. Look for what the awesome professors want that they don't currently get from universities like Harvard, and see if your university can provide it. Or failing that, find something that they might want and persuade them of it. 

Comments on _Critical Chain_, ch 1 & 2

Chapter 1 starts the book with a scene of a meeting between managers.

the top manager decided to make a think tank of young guys.

he presenting them with the biggest threat endangering the future of the company.

he starts describing the problem. he talks about the typical sales over time curve of products. he said there's a rise, a leveling off, and a decline. he said that their products aren't following that curve. it looks more like a triangle. it's the new products that are causing older products to drop off in sales as soon as they reach their high point.

the young guy thinks maybe that's the problem. maybe they shouldn't be putting out their newer products so quickly after the older models.

I think that depends on what happening in the rest of the market.

Correct. The frantic race in the market forces us to launch a t new generation of modems every six months or so.

a bit later we learn that development time for a product is 2 years and they have to roll out a new model every 6 months.

and the think tank was tasked to figure out how to dramatically decrease the development time. 

---------------------

Chapter 2 

The book switches gears. The scene and subject matter are totally different. It's about a guy who was assigned to teach an executive MBA class (where the students are actual managers of companies) about a subject that hasn't been decided yet.

He was chosen for the task because he's a good teacher. 

His good teaching is described as...

“I chose you because of your unique style of teaching," he surprises me.

"Teaching through open discussion?" I'm astonished.

“Yes," he says categorically. "For this program I'm more and more convinced that that is the only prudent way. The students have the relevant day-to-day experience. Open debate, steering a group of people to develop the know-how themselves, is how we should teach them. And I don't have many instructors who are both willing and know how to do it."

Then the decision-maker assigned the class reminded the professor of some advice from the past...

“Not to bite off too much," I remind him. "To forget the dreams about changing the world and take on a subject I could finish."

I think this means: don't make your near term goals be beyond your current skill such that you can't achieve them. but it's ok to have huge long term goals, but you don't need to think about them much while you're working on your near term goals. (some thinking has to go into it though, cuz like you don't want your near term goals to be incompatible with your long term goals.)

The chapter ends with the choice to teach a class (and do research) on project management because that field hasn't had a great improvement in decades.

Comments on _The Choice_ - session #1

I wanted to make an idea tree of this book but I decided to do a substep first: just write out some ideas, not necessarily in a well structured tree. Maybe I'll do a tree later using this work as a reference.

• I think the title of the book refers to the *most important choice*.
• most important choice = the choice to constantly devote time to understand stuff in one's life
• this is the same attitude of BOI/FI
• most people most of the time are living by ideas they don't even try to understand. they accept the status quo as truth.
• this book (or maybe it was another book by Goldratt) talks about how people incorrectly put effort into non-bottlenecks instead of putting effort into bottlenecks, which causes no additional throughput (e.g. company profit). 
• in this book, Goldratt talked about managers who put effort into initiatives that produced some profit gains, which means they were bottlenecks, but those were gains that were small compared to other potential gains from other potential initiatives. that means there are bigger and smaller bottlenecks. and it means that increasing capacity at a bigger bottleneck produces more throughput than compared to increasing capacity at a smaller bottleneck.
• he explains that the worst bottleneck people have is the mentality of not even trying to understand, just accepting the status quo as truth.
• he talked about how people treat the potential small improvements as the only thing that's available. they don't even imagine the existence of potential gigantic improvements.
• and by avoiding even imagining the existence of potential gigantic improvements, people don't find them. you can't find what you don't look for.
• ideas have reach
• In chapter 3, Goldratt's daughter wonders how her father could still think there are huge improvements waiting to be created after having just created a huge improvement. I thought it's because Goldratt knows that his theory was only applied in one area of the company and that he has yet to try to apply it to the rest of the company.
• Inherent simplicity: Goldratt talks about the idea of inherent simplicity, which is that there are no contradictions in reality, and that there are no inherent conflicts between people. 
• Inherent simplicity = benevolent universe premise
• implies that win/lose is always avoidable, win/win always possible
• people who don't know this just accept contradictions/conflicts/compromises as unquestionable truths.
• degrees of freedom
• (just reminding myself of my idea that making rules for oneself is a way to reduce degrees of freedom.)
• Goldratt talks about why adults accept win-lose situations: cuz as children they were presented with a lot of win-lose situations (parents didn't help them find win-win situations instead).
• When reality =/= expectation, consider that an error that deserves effort to fix (an area of potential improvement), such that either reality changes to meet expectation, or expectation changes to meet reality, or both expectation and reality change such that they are equal.
• That error could have huge reach. You don't know at the start. You can only know after enough investigation. Like you may create a general theory of why reality failed to meet expectation in the one particular case, and then you can try to apply that general theory to all other cases of reality not meeting expectation.

Exercises to prevent knee pain

In curi blog comments someone posted a few videos about how to stop knee pain. I watched the first video and I have some comments.

The hip exercise shown at the end was interesting. I've never seen it before.

I do something that seems similar. I think it activates the same muscles.

What I do is stand on one leg, initially just letting my free leg be above the floor a bit. Then I rotate my free leg in such a way where I extend it fully in one direction and then fully in the other direction. So like at one point my free leg is behind me while my torso is somewhat near parallel to the floor. At the other end of it, my free leg is in front of me, pointing as far as I can in the direction of the standing leg, while my torso is straight up. (At all times my arms are extended in opposite directions to help keep balance.)

I do this exercise partly to help strengthen my hips but also to strengthen my ankles and to improve my balance overall.

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EDIT: I should have explained how I move from one end of the movement to the other. I swing my leg such that it's as close to parallel to the floor as I can get it. (If that's too hard for you re balance, then lower the leg such that you are balanced.)

What kind of meta discussion is good?

In the latest tutoring screencast (just before this point) between Elliot and Max, Elliot says something like: The old TCS list had anti-meta tradition designed to hide social rules.

i'm reminded of like 2 occasions where Elliot asked me something like *what type of meta discussion?* in response to me saying something like *do meta discussion*.

i think that each time I saw elliot's question, i misunderstood it. i'm not sure. anyway i want to fix that.

one thing i think his question exposes is that I didn't say what type of meta discussion should be done. so like i could have instead said *do meta discussion [purposed for solving problem X]*.

the kind of meta discussion that i think is good is meta discussion that is purposed for improving discussion methods. (this applies to multi-person discussion and self-discussion.)

examples:

• (self-discussion) if you're sad, do meta discussion about it. that means instead of thinking about what you're sad over (the object of your sadness), talk about sadness in general, how you deal with sadness in general, what methods you use when you notice you're sad, etc. So my advice is to do meta discussion instead of just doing things that (immediately and temporarily) get rid of the sadness.

• (multi-person discussion) if two people are having a discussion and one of them notices a stuck point in the discussion, he can do meta discussion as a way to make the object discussion become unstuck.