Welcome!
Welcome to Knowledge Jolt with Jack. This is where I have been keeping my ongoing thoughts about knowledge management, Theory of Constraints, and related topics since 2004.
One of my biggest interests is how these techniques can help the individual perform better in their role, and then how that individual performance can roll up to a higher-level business performance. Because if individuals cannot do well, there is no chance that the organization can do well.
Please explore the webiste, subscribe to my webfeed, or learn some more about me. Even better, leave a comment here or take the thoughts into your own website and extend them.
What follows are excerpts of my recent blog entries. Click through for the full text.
Drew Greenblatt, the president of Marlin Steel has a nice appreciation of Eli Goldratt on the Inc. website, The Man Who Saved My Company | Inc.com. (Yes, Eli Goldratt died two years ago.)
He opens with the familiar struggle and goes on to talk about how he was able to pull his company out of the struggles with help from The Goal, and Theory of Constraints.
Read the full article.
Is Agile at all compatible with project management? Should we even try to make them talk to each other? Wolfram Müller talked through his views on Agile, and on how some of the TOC applications could be thought of as working together with the Agile mechanisms.
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Steve Holt had some fun with his talk at TOCICO this year that he created out of conversations with April K Mills of Engine for Change. This time he suggests create policy buffers to protect change efforts.
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Prof. James Holt usually gave a talk about Managing Complex Organizations this morning at the TOC ICO conference. The basic idea is to use Throughput Dollar Days and Inventory Dollar Days internally.
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What am I good at?
What do I love to do?
What drives me?
What fits my personality? These questions are the core of today' full-day session on TOC for Personal Growth, by Efrat Goldratt.
Read the full article.
How can we take advantage of what Theory of Constraints teaches as well as bring in thinking from other disciplines to learn? Specifically, how do we learn from a single occurrence - an occurrence of something going awry? This was the question that Eli Schragenheim tried to answer in his talk this morning on "Learning from ONE event: A structured organizational learning process to inquire and learn the right lessons from a single event."
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Rami Goldratt of Goldratt Consulting talked about the latest knowledge that is coming out of TOC implementations in retailers. It's about what NOT to replenish.
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Avraham Mordoch presented his thoughts on an organizational maturity model for project management environments, and specifically related to Critical Chain Project Management. It was very interesting to listen to in relation to my recent experiences with project management work.
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How about this for advocating Theory of Constraints? The opening keynote from Mazda at the TOC ICO conference ended with the statement, "Made with TOC." They even had a couple cars in the parking lot to show off.
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My review of "The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win" by Gene Kim and gang. I enjoyed it, and ended up staying up late to finish it. The structure of the book is quite familiar: business novel; looming disaster; averted with the determination of the protagonist (and colleagues) and the help of a wacky "guru." There are some new-to-me concepts that fit neatly with my current worldview.
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I re-read Eli Goldratt's The Goal. I enjoyed reading it again for the nuggets embedded throughout and the reminder that this is a solid way to help people and organizations think differently about their situation.
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Believing in the inherent value and quality of people comes out in how you challenge them and what you expect of them. It has much less to do with your direct personal style.
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