In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood. Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively. That paper - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", became

Snipped from an upcoming article. Why profitability is proportional to "clock speed". It seems reasonable to claim that an organization’s profitability is proportional to its clock speed (the speed at which it operates). But it’s worth understanding exactly why this is the case.

Another snip from my upcoming article: Whenever an organization is chaotic, a black market in tasks emerges. This happens when formal schedules and lead-time commitments cease to be trustworthy. In this environment, tasks need to be expedited to be completed within reasonable

Another snip from that upcoming paper. Earlier, I inferred that an organization’s profitability is proportional to its clock speed (the speed at which it operates). This claim probably seems intuitively correct. But it’s worth understanding exactly why it's true. Let’s define

Jon Matzner jameson (big deck energy) Zac Gawn I’m hard inhaling everything written by Justin Roff-Marsh so hardcore right now

One last snip from my upcoming paper. Administrators have trained managers to believe that maximizing the efficiency of every individual department or resource will automatically maximize the efficiency—and profitability—of the whole organization. This flawed belief largely

Great interview! youtu.be/uJ_VW-h1FO0?si…

Musings on Throughput per Constraint Unit. In the TOC community, our most critical ratio is Throughput per Constraint Unit (T/Cu). I’m not convinced everyone understands the power of this metric. If you’re considering the past, profit is arithmetic (revenue minus cost). But if

If your business is in an orderly (i.e., non-chaotic) state, AND if you are acting to maximize profitability, you WILL have this configuration of resources. One critical fully-loaded (or maximally-loaded) resource, and all others with some idle (protective) capacity. You may

Your business has a tendency to slide into chaos. It'll be significantly more profitable when you eliminate this tendency. 📖Read more in my two transformational books: An Ode to Speed and The Machine. ballistix.com/#free-downloads

I absolutely despise the despicable habit marketing folks have of using the word "brand" to refer to their products or organizations. Your value (to the extent there actually is value) is not your mark or your label, it's your damn products. To imply otherwise is foolish and

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If you want to move your business to the speed-based operating system, pricing may be the the ideal "attack vector". The proposition here is more concrete, and the benefits immediate.

For folks interested in the Theory of Constraints (TOC), let me drop a little thought-bomb on you! Traditionally, we conceptualize the business as a single system, and we create a model of this system with a Goal and a Constraint (that's right, these are attributes of the model,

In most manufacturers, the engineering team is both critical and fragile. As the organization scales, there’s a tendency for the engineering team to be the first point of failure. If the organization slides into a chaotic state, the chaos tends to start in the engineering

I'm playing with the idea that all day-to-day management decisions in even the most complex of organizations can be distilled into one simple rule. Here it is. If you can increase the productivity of your organization’s critical value-generating resource, do that. If not,

If you have complex customer relationships, here’s a common problem. Unlike a less complex business, you don’t jump straight from winning a new account to transacting with that account. There’s a critical onboarding phase. Maybe you need to research the nature and volume of

You would think that, given the purpose of a business is to generate PROFIT, that every business owner and executive would have a clear and unambiguous definition of that important word. But they don’t. And you probably don’t, either. (If I’m wrong, reply, and take me to task.)