End of an Era?

I debated with myself whether the phrase 'End of an Era', a well worn cliche, lends itself well to describe the passing away of Dr. Eliyahu M Goldratt, founder and propagator of Theory Of Constraints (TOC), a radical management philosophy.

There are any number of people in business, consulting and academics, who have not heard of Goldratt or TOC. They will certainly not think that his death is of any great consequence. In fact a Google search yields just 11 news items about it.

I was one of those people until a few years back. When I first heard of TOC, the person who told me about it said it was an SCM package to be implemented in competition to SAP APO or I2. And I believed him.

I subsequently got exposed to TOC and was profoundly impacted. And there are thousands more who are passionate about TOC, sometimes overwhelmingly so. For them, the news was a shock, especially because even a month before he died, it was not generally known that he was ill and battling lung cancer.

Dr. Goldratt was a physicist who started his business career by setting up a company that made a finite capacity scheduling software for shop floor, said to be the first such one. While it was received well in the market, Goldratt became disenchanted because he found that attitudes, assumptions and policies prevented the clients from using it to the full.

He wrote about these issues in a business novel 'The Goal' (that was a novel thing to do!). It became a big hit and was the genesis of TOC. He subsequently expanded and developed TOC by becoming not just its founder, but also top consultant and evangelist. He also placed most of his creations in public domain, open for anyone to read and apply.

While TOC started as a operations solution, Goldratt went on to develop excellent solutions for distribution, sales and marketing and project management. He has also popularized his 'Thinking Process', a cause and effect thinking process to resolve issues in any discipline.

Some of the gems of wisdom of TOC are:

     A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.
     The goal of a business organization is to make money.
     Local optimization does not lead to global improvement.
     Increase in the efficiency of a non-constraint is a mirage.
     The most scarce resource in a business organization is management time.
     All manufacturing plants can be represented as I, V, A or T types.

Goldratt also clarified that TOC is not in conflict with management tools like Six Sigma, Lean, JIT etc. His article 'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants' explored the progress of operations philosophy over the ages culminating in TOC.

Probably 'end of an era' is not the right phrase. Hopefully the TOC era is just starting and will last for a long time.