Economies of scale For a while I worked in an organisation that obsessed about costs. Everybody had a target to cut the costs that they managed. If everybody reduced their costs then the total cost would go down. Or so the logic went. The cost of printing There was a man who owned the stationary budget: paper, […]
The Rules of the Workplace
The 20 rules: Prioritise the work Don’t make your customers wait There is always more work than people Study the work Understand how the work works Standardise the work If the work is important write it down Train your staff Make the work easy Build systems Stream line the work Find the bottleneck Clean the […]
Rule 12: Find the Bottleneck
The job of an Ops Manager Is to manage three things: Time: how long does it take you to deliver something? Cost: how much money did you spend getting it there? Quality: how good was it when it arrived? We get hung up on cost “Make it cheaper, hit the budget”. Making things cheaper is easy, you […]
Innovation Constraints and Lateral Thinking
In the third world, 4 million children die every year within a month of birth. It’s an avoidable tragedy If half of those children were simply kept warm and clean they would survive. In the developed world we have incubators that do exactly that. I spent the first week of my life in one. And […]
There is Always a Bottleneck
All processes have a bottle neck, a rate limiting step. Something that holds them back. There is always a bottleneck. Maybe it’s the neck of the bottle: Maybe it’s the speed of the pump: Maybe it’s the width of the falls: Maybe it’s even the lack of rain: But there is always a bottleneck or […]