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)