Archives: Strategy
The 5-Step FOCUS – Start Again
‘Avoid inertia. Start again.’ Those were Goldratt’s exact words for the final focusing step. Once you’ve made an investment of money, time and effort, the constraint will move. Ideally, you’ll find it where you intended.
The 5-Step FOCUS – Uplift system performance
Once you’ve squeezed all the blood you can from a stone, it’s time to get more stones. In its essence, that’s what the uplift step is all about.
The 5-Step FOCUS – Collaborate Around the Constraint
While it may be desirable to be liked when asking people with whom you work to collaborate, it is not always necessary, and it is never sufficient.
mediumThe 5 Step Focus – Optimise the Constraint
All improvement is change, but not all change is an improvement. We can optimise sales, or marketing, or manufacturing, or supply chain, or HR, or IT. Indeed, you can optimise any subsystem of your organisation. But how will it affect your business outcome?
The 5-Step FOCUS – Find The Constraint
Constraints aren’t your enemy—they’re your friend. If you want the most bang-for-buck for your effort, despite the connotation of the word constraint, it’s precisely at that place you’ll find the leverage you’re looking for.
The 5 Step FOCUS – Identifying the System
In one of Eli Goldratt’s last essays, his introduction to the TOC Handbook, he wrote: ‘Can we condense all of TOC into one sentence? I think it is possible to condense it into a single word: focus.’
