DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Goal is a business novel. It’s interesting enough to read after work, and valuable enough that you’ll be a little smarter when you return to work the next morning.

I would not normally expect a book written 20 years ago about a manufacturing plant to have much to say about modern-day information technology. But there are valuable lessons here about process management, meaning literally how to manage any process. They’re presented as lessons about how to run a manufacturing plant, but they’re really lessons about how to think.

The book is a novel, although you shouldn’t read it for tips on character development or crafty plot work. The format is a slave to the mission, or dare I say the goal? The characters arrive at answers after false starts and detours, enabling the reader to experience the analysis that would not be present in a one-page summary of “Eli Goldratt’s Ideas About Process Management.”

This is, in fact, one of the lessons of the book: learning is a result of doing, not of being told.

Even so, I’ll share one of the key concepts of the “Theory of Constraints,” an idea introduced here that apparently revolutionized the manufacturing world. Quoting from Goldratt’s consulting website: “just as the strength of a chain is dictated by its weakest link, the performance of any value-chain is dictated by its constraint.” If you can find the worst-performing section of any process, or code, or team, then you’ve found the limiting factor on the system’s overall throughput. Fix that bottleneck and you will have improved the system.

The main character in the book arrives at this conclusion in a long passage describing a hike with a group of Boy Scouts. I won’t recount the story here, because it’s the best part of the book — essentially, the main character proves the Theory of Constraints by analysing hikers on a trail. It’s far removed from running a manufacturing plant, or from managing a software project, or from being productive with your free time for that matter, but Goldratt’s ideas still apply.

I recommend The Goal. I learned from it, and I can imagine rereading it in a few years as a refresher course on clear thinking.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)

I’ve only ever bought one car from a dealership. They played me like an AM radio. I was a novice and they knew it.

At one point, we’d been kept waiting for 15 minutes while the salesman supposedly convinced his manager to allow us to buy the car for such an amazingly low price. I got impatient and walked outside, onto the lot. Through a window I could see into the manager’s office. Our salesman and a couple more who looked just like him, jewelry and white Oxfords and ties, were sitting around drinking coffee and telling jokes and obviously not poring over our deal. Our salesman saw me, gulped, grab his paperwork and ran out to catch me. He thought I was leaving, and if I had it to do over, I would have kept moving toward my car. Every step would have been worth $250.

I’m not used to playing games when I don’t know the rules. Next time I buy a new car, I’ll be prepared, for I’ve just read the “cheats” guide to the car-sales industry.

Edmunds.com hired a journalist to get a job at a dealership and write about the dirty tricks employed therein. You’ve inferred many of these, but seeing them in print will likely still surprise you.

Well worth your lunch hour: Confessions of a Car Salesman

Clairvoyance = the Law of Large Numbers + Confirmation Bias

Or, coincidence does not equal ESP.

Experience more critical thinking at Skeptic Magazine.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is a non-partisan advocacy group dedicated to creating a “cleaner, healthier environment and a safer world.” In a February report entitled Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making, 62 reputable scientists “charged the Bush administration with widespread and unprecedented ‘manipulation of the process through which science enters into its decisions.’”

Here’s one timely example, copied from a brochure they mailed me. (See a longer version here: Information on Power Plant Mercury Emissions Censored)

Mercury is a neurotoxin that can cause brain damage and harm reproduction in humans and wildlife. Coal-fired power plants are the nation’s largest source of mercury air emissions. Faced with congressional proposals to strongly regulate these mercury emissions, Bush officials suppressed and sought to manipulate government information about merucry contained in an EPA report on children’s health and the environment. After nine months, a frustrated EPA official leaked the draft report to the Wall Street Journal, which revealed one of the report’s findings that eight percent of women between the ages of 16 and 49 have mercury levels in the blood that could lead to reduced IQ and motor skills in their offspring. The finding provides strong evidence in direct contradiction to the administration’s desired policy of reducing regulation on coal-fired power plants… Perhaps most troubling about this incident is that the report may never have surfaced at all had it not been leaked to the press.

There is a pattern here; in August 2003, the Bush administration lied to New Yorkers about the presence of dangerous asbestos due to the WTC attack.

“I’m from the government; I’m here to help” really shouldn’t be the punchline to a joke.