This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Monday, December 13, 2004
A New Favorite TOC Book -- On Saturday evening, I finally got around to picking up one of the newer books on TOC, The Cash Machine: Using the Theory of Constraints for Sales Management by Richard Klapholz and Alex Klarman. Going into it, I'll admit I was a bit skeptical, thinking it was going to be just another Goal-wannabe "business novel." But at 1:30 on Sunday morning, I finished it and considered the 4 hours time well spent.
Literarily, it's a more episodic than novelistic, as the protaganist, Roger, takes on different aspects of his new assignment as VP of Sales as he moves through several iterations of the five focusing steps of TOC. But from a learning perspective, or at least from a perspective of introducing TOC logistical concepts, it's moved up toward the top of my list of recommended books on TOC, not quite displacing Deming and Goldratt (which is more of a straight how-to and not a "business novel") but right up there among and even above some of Goldratt's novels. As a matter of fact, if you are in a knowledge working environment rather than manufacturing, I'd aim you to The Cash Machine even before The Goal for a quick, easy-to-digest read.
The book does a good job of putting bottleneck management in the context of a business process (selling) environment instead of the usual manufacturing processes, applying it to the funnel concept and a 10-step selling process I suspect is familiar to most sales organizations. The self-defeating effects of multi-tasking are offered up in terms of a sales support group, along with some practical advice on saying "yes, later" instead of "yes" with meaningless implicit promises or "no." There's a few conflict resolution diagrams (clouds) sprinkled throughout, as well as a Current Reality Tree addressing the "end of quarter syndrome." Finally, as something new (to me at least), it offers up an approach to sales incentives and budgets in which anyone comfortable with buffer management would feel at home. Overall, the book does an excellent job of laying out the application of TOC to the "contact-to-cash" process that is the "cash machine" of the title.
The Cash Machine is now my top "business novel" recommendation for non-manufacturing environments. While it's nominally set in a sales organization, the leap to application of its ideas in any "white collar" business process is a far shorter leap than that from other books on the subject. Check it out.
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