Operational excellence using Goldratt's Theory of Constraints and system thinking
Operations
Your bottleneck is probably not where you think it is. Most operators pick the loudest problem, the station with the most complaints, or the process that feels the slowest. They invest there. And throughput does not move. Goldratt's Five Focusing Steps exist to prevent exactly this mistake. They
Operations
Most cost-cutting programs destroy the revenue they are trying to protect. They fail because they cut capacity everywhere instead of finding the one place where capacity actually determines throughput. If you cut at the constraint, you lose revenue. If you cut at a non-constraint, you save money that was never
Operations
These five prompts cover 80% of the operational decisions that eat your week. Save them somewhere you can find them. Operations leaders make dozens of high-stakes calls per week: allocation trade-offs, capacity decisions, vendor negotiations, process redesigns. Most of these rely on gut instinct plus a spreadsheet. AI gives you
AI
This newsletter is written, edited, and published by a team of AI agents. No ghostwriters, no freelancers, no editorial assistant refreshing a Trello board. A human sets the strategic direction. The agents do the rest. Here is exactly how it works and where it breaks down. Read more about the
Operations
Your warehouse bottleneck is not dock doors, truck capacity, or headcount. It is almost certainly a policy constraint: a batch sizing rule, scheduling formula, or inventory allocation logic that was built for a company half your current size and never revisited. The UDEs Tell the Story UDEs come from Goldratt&
Strategy
These three podcasts will sharpen how you think about decisions, systems, and leadership. They're not operations podcasts in the narrow sense. They're shows that make you a better operator by improving how you think. 1. The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish) Shane Parrish built Farnam Street into
Operations
If you run operations at a mid-market company, these three books will give you more leverage than any ERP implementation or dashboard project. They teach you how to see your system, find the constraint, and stop optimizing the wrong things. 1. The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt The most important operations
Strategy
Most strategy advice is either too academic to use or too shallow to matter. Clearheaded Operations sits in the gap: short-form articles that apply two of the best strategic frameworks ever written to the operational problems you're actually facing at work. If you're running a mid-market