Now I’m assuming you’ve all read Eli Goldratt’s Classic 1995 manufacturing engineering business novel ‘The Goal’?
No?
Just me then?
Not actually joking by the way – I have a very useful degree in Manufacturing Engineering and Operations Management.
In The Goal, the plant-manager character takes his son’s Boy Scout troop out for a hike in the woods.
While the troop starts out in an evenly spaced column on the trail, soon the spacing between the boys stretches out until the lead boy is far ahead of the tail of the line.
Along the way, our plant manager is thinking about dependent processes and the statistical variance of task completion times.
Like you do!
The bottleneck ends up being the one particular kid in the troop, Herbie.
In the story, the plant manager learns a key to managing bottleneck, moving Herbie’s position in the line, eventually placing him at the front.
Whilst I’m sure you are all thrilled to hear about my engineering past, there is a point here.
BTW – next week’s emails will cover the principals of Kaizan, JIT and maybe some CAD (joking, you’ll be please to hear).
The point is that we all have bottlenecks.
And learning to manage them is the big win.
They are the things that slow everything else down.
Putting time and effort into sorting them will give a far better return on investment than lots of other little things.
If you’re eating a crappy breakfast (cereal, toast, juice, etc) then that will be holding you back more than everything else for the rest of the day.
You’ll be in more of a fat storage mode.
You’re more likely to eat crap for the rest of the day.
Your energy levels will be lower.
5 more minutes sorting a good breakfast (real food, equal amounts of energy from of protein, fat and carbs) will give you better results than 20 more minutes of exercise.
If you don’t sleep well than getting blackout blinds and / or supplementing with magnesium and zinc takes next to no time.
And will produce huge returns.
If a lack of flexibility limits your training then stretching whilst watching TV is big win.
Eg: If you can’t squat deeply without having your heels on something, stretch your hip flexor so and calves till you can
Not sure how, ask us how.
You get the idea.
Look at the thing that’s holding you back the most.
That’s having knock in effects.
Find your Herbie.
And sort him out 😉
Much love,
Jon ‘Goes Bananas’ Hall and Matt ‘Rides Again’ Nicholson
P.S. There’s that find out more meeting in a few weeks – myrise.co.uk/briefing-meeting
