Theory Of Constraints Quotes

Science is no inexorable march to truth, mediated by the collection of objective information and the destruction of ancient superstition. Scientists, as ordinary human beings, unconsciously reflect in their theories the social and political constraints of their times.

The minute you supply a person with the answers, by that very action you block them, once and for all, from the opportunity of inventing those same answers for themselves. If you want to go on an ego trip, to show how smart you are, give the answers. But if what you want is action to be taken, then you must refrain from giving the answers.

To a Western observer, schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom, it is precisely the lack of freedom—freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny—that underlies so many of the troubles of the Muslim world. But the road to democracy, as the Western experience amply demonstrates, is long and hard, full of pitfalls and obstacles." Page 115

The Internet’s abundant capacity has removed the old artificial constraints on publishing—including getting our content checked and verified. The new strategy of publishing everything we find out thus results in an immense cloud of data, free of theory, published before verified, and available to anyone with an Internet connection. And this is changing the role that facts have played as the foundation of knowledge.

I still feel glad to emphasize the duty, the defining characteristic of the pure scientist—probably to be found working in universities—who commit themselves absolutely to specialized goals, to seek the purest manifestation of any possible phenomenon that they are investigating, to create laboratories that are far more controlled than you would ever find in industry, and to ignore any constraints imposed by, as it were, realism. Further down the scale, people who understand and want to exploit results of basic science have to do a great deal more work to adapt and select the results, and combine the results from different sources, to produce something that is applicable, useful, and profitable on an acceptable time scale.

Spend just two hours reading this chapter and if you don’t get at least one good idea for your business, contact me and I will give you a refund!1

Oulipo does not “explain” poetry, Ouilpo tries to find constraints for new kinds of poems. Oulipo is not into theory, it is a place of creation.

actually constraints of the worldview and epistemology of Eurocentrism itself, rather than artifacts of universal time and that therefore Africacentered scholars, applying a perspective external to that limited framework can say much more in terms of the potential for traversing presumed barriers of the space-time matrix.

Not for the last time in these pages, we find that the subversive logic of love quietly enters—then devastatingly explodes—the matchstick scaffolding of simple binaries upon which the modern world hangs its most cherished values. Ask a lover if she experiences her passion to please her sweetheart as a constraint; ask her whether she feels like a dupe of someone else’s power games: she will either laugh out loud or look at you with profound pity.

governments budgeted anywhere from one-tenth to more than one-half of their economies to fight the pandemic. No taxpayers were called upon to foot the bill, no creditors were asked to lend them money. Governments voted for the budgets they considered to be necessary and their central banks made the payments. The size of the response was all the evidence one needed to grasp the monetary reality. Governments which issue and control their own currencies face no financing constraints and no threat of insolvency or default.

We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others. In my drama, perhaps, I am Hamlet or Iago or at least the swineherd who may yet become a prince, but to you I am only A Gentleman or at best Second Murderer, while you are my Polonius or my Gravedigger, but your own hero. Each of our dramas exerts constraints on each other’s, making the whole different from the parts, but still dramatic.

The theory of the long tail as popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name is that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of major hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare. 5

The fundamental problem with learning mathematics is that while the number sense may be genetic, exact calculation requires cultural tools—symbols and algorithms—that have been around for only a few thousand years and must therefore be absorbed by areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes. The process is made easier when what we are learning harmonizes with built-in circuitry. If we can’t change the architecture of our brains, we can at least adapt our teaching methods to the constraints it imposes. For nearly three decades, American educators have pushed “reform math,” in which children are encouraged to explore their own ways of solving problems. Before reform math, there was the “new math,” now widely thought to have been an educational disaster. (In France, it was called les maths modernes and is similarly despised.) The new math was grounded in the theories of the influential Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who believed that children are born without any sense of number and only gradually build up the concept in a series of developmental stages. Piaget thought that children, until the age of four or five, cannot grasp the simple principle that moving objects around does not affect how many of them there are, and that there was therefore no point in trying to teach them arithmetic before the age of six or seven.

Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed (yes, I thought; see Glaucon, Tetlock, and Ariely in chapter 4). Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience (yes; see Hume in chapter 2 and Baron-Cohen on systemizing in chapter 6). Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize, but if we strip these institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie and social disorder (yes; see Durkheim in chapters 8 and 11). Based

Nietzsche’s ‘theory of knowledge’ […] consists in the attempt to comprehend the categorical framework of the natural sciences (space, time, event), the concept of laws (causality), the operational axis of experience (measurement), and the rules of logic and calculation as the relative a priori of a world of objective illusion that has been produced for the purposes of mastering nature and of preserving existence: “the entire cognitive apparatus is an apparatus for abstraction and simplification—not directed at knowledge but at the control of things: ‘end’ and ‘means’ are as far from the essence as are ‘concepts.’” […] Nietzsche conceives science as the activity through which we turn ‘nature’ into concepts for the purpose of mastering nature. The compulsion to logical correctness and empirical accuracy exemplifies the constraint of the interest in possible technical control over objectified natural processes, and thereby the compulsion to preserving existence.

A parallel comparison helps to capture the similarities between existentialism (especially Nietzsche's) and Daoism (especially Zhuangzi's). Both discover the practical pointlessness of universal or absolute meaning (purpose). Nietzsche, from his perspective as a disappointed Christian yearning for absolute, transcendent, dependence on God, experiences this awareness with existentialist angst, a sensation of looking off a cliff into a bottomless abyss. The angst is caused by the vertigo impulse, the fear we will jump or drop off our perch into that nothingness. Zhuangzi, from his Daoist sense of the constraint of conventional authority, does not think of any cliff as a reference point. If the abyss is bottomless, then there is no such thing as falling. The cliff and Zhuangzi are both floating free. Leaving the cliff and entering the abyss is weightlessness―free flight―not falling. From his relativistic perspective, the cliff is floating away. Zhuangzi's reaction is not "Oh no!" but "Whee!

Support on the home front for the soldier, regardless of ethical and political disagreements over the war itself. is essential. This is never easy in the emotionally polarized climate of a war. However, when facing individual soldiers, we must remember that all modern soldiers serve under constraint. The justice of overall war aims and of operational theories -- "strate-gic" bombing of civilians to weaken the industrial capacity to wage war is an example of such theory -- is not within the individual soldier's scope of moral choice, unless he or she is willing to face imprisonment or death by refusing to fight. I cannot hold soldiers to an ethical standard that requires martyrdom in order simply to be blameless. I am not arguing against the Nuremberg principles, which say that no person is absolved of responsibility for horrible acts by the fact that he or she was legally ordered to do them. I am speaking from the pain that I feel when I witness in our veterans the ruin of moral life by the overwhelming coercive social power of military institutions and of war itself.

What you write down becomes fixed. It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A roadsign. You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price. You’ll never know where it might have gone if you’d left it alone to go there. In any conjecture you’re always looking for weaknesses. But sometimes you have the sense that you should hold off. Be patient. Have a little faith. You really want to see what the conjecture itself is going to drag up out of the murk. I don’t know how one does mathematics. I don’t know that there is a way. The idea is always struggling against its own realization. Ideas come with an innate skepticism, they don’t go barreling ahead. And these doubts have their origin in the same world as the idea itself. And that’s not something you really have access to. So the reservations that you yourself in the your world of struggle bring to the table may actually be alien to the path of these emerging structures. Their own intrinsic doubts are steering-mechanisms while yours are more like brakes. Of course the idea is going to come to an end anyway. Once a mathematical conjecture is formalized into a theory it may have a certain luster to it but with rare exceptions you can no longer entertain the illusion that it holds some deep insights into the core of reality. It has in fact begun to look like a tool.

All right. It’s not just that I dont have to write things down. There’s more to it than that. What you write down becomes fixed. It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A roadsign. You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price. You’ll never know where it might have gone if you’d left it alone to go there. In any conjecture you’re always looking for weaknesses. But sometimes you have the sense that you should hold off. Be patient. Have a little faith. You really want to see what the conjecture itself is going to drag up out of the murk. I dont know how one does mathematics. I dont know that there is a way. The idea is always struggling against its own realization. Ideas come with an innate skepticism, they dont just go barreling ahead. And these doubts have their origin in the same world as the idea itself. And that’s not something you really have access to. So the reservations that you yourself in your world of struggle bring to the table may actually be alien to the path of these emerging structures. Their own intrinsic doubts are steering-mechanisms while yours are more like brakes. Of course the idea is going to come to an end anyway. Once a mathematical conjecture is formalized into a theory it may have a certain luster to it but with rare exceptions you can no longer entertain the illusion that it holds some deep insight into the core of reality. It has in fact begun to look like a tool.

We may wish to control or influence the behavior of others in conflict, and we want, therefore, to know how the variables that are subject to our control can affect their behavior. If we confine our study to the theory of strategy, we seriously restrict ourselves by the assumption of rational behavior — not just of intelligent behavior, but of behavior motivated by a conscious calculation of advantages, a calculation that in turn is based on an explicit and internally consistent value system. We thus limit the applicability of any results we reach. If our interest is the study of actual behavior, the results we reach under this constraint may prove to be either a good approximation of reality or a caricature. Any abstraction runs a risk of this sort, and we have to be prepared to use judgment with any results we reach. The advantage of cultivating the area of “strategy” for theoretical development is not that, of all possible approaches, it is the one that evidently stays closest to the truth, but that the assumption of rational behavior is a productive one. It gives a grip on the subject that is peculiarly conducive to the development of theory. It permits us to identify our own analytical processes with those of the hypothetical participants in a conflict; and by demanding certain kinds of consistency in the behavior of our hypothetical participants, we can examine alternative courses of behavior according to whether or not they meet those standards of consistency. The premise of “rational behavior” is a potent one for the production of theory. Whether the resulting theory provides good or poor insight into actual behavior is, I repeat, a matter for subsequent judgment.

It is perhaps easier for an English writer than it is for an Italian to see through that nonsense, and to perceive what it is designed to conceal: the deep structural similarity between communism and fascism, both as theory and as practice, and their common antagonism to parliamentary and constitutional forms of government. Even if we accept the – highly fortuitous – identification of National Socialism and Italian Fascism, to speak of either as the true political opposite of communism is to betray the most superficial understanding of modern history. In truth there is an opposite of all the ‘isms’, and that is negotiated politics, without an ‘ism’ and without a goal other than the peaceful coexistence of rivals. Communism, like fascism, involved the attempt to create a mass popular movement and a state bound together under the rule of a single party, in which there will be total cohesion around a common goal. It involved the elimination of opposition, by whatever means, and the replacement of ordered dispute between parties by clandestine ‘discussion’ within the single ruling elite. It involved taking control – ‘in the name of the people’ – of the means of communication and education, and instilling a principle of command throughout the economy. Both movements regarded law as optional and constitutional constraints as irrelevant – for both were essentially revolutionary, led from above by an ‘iron discipline’. Both aimed to achieve a new kind of social order, unmediated by institutions, displaying an immediate and fraternal cohesiveness. And in pursuit of this ideal association – called a fascio by nineteenth-century Italian socialists – each movement created a form of military government, involving the total mobilization of the entire populace,3 which could no longer do even the most peaceful-seeming things except in a spirit of war, and with an officer in charge. This mobilization was put on comic display, in the great parades and festivals that the two ideologies created for their own glorification.

the bourgeoisie wanted to insert something more than just the negative law of “this is not yours” between the worker and the production apparatus he had in his hands. A supplementary code was needed that complements this law and gets it to work: the worker himself had to be moralized. When he is told: “You are only your labor-power and I have paid the market price for it,”‡ and when so much wealth is put in his hands, it is necessary to inject into the relationship between the worker and what he is working on a whole series of obligations and constraints that overlay the law of wages, which is apparently the simple law of the market.§ The wage contract must be accompanied by a coercion that is like its validity clause: the working class must be “regenerated,” “moralized.” Thus the transfer of the penitentiary takes place with one social class applying it to another: it is in this class relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that the condensed and remodeled penitentiary system begins to function; it will be a political instrument of the control and maintenance of relations of production. Fourth, something more is needed for this supplementary code to function effectively and for the delinquent actually to appear as a social enemy: the actual separation of delinquents from non-delinquents within those lower strata practicing illegalism. The great continuous mass of economico-political illegalism, going from common law crime to political revolt, must be broken up and the purely delinquent must be placed on one side, and those free of delinquency, who may be called non-delinquent, on the other. Thus, the bourgeoisie has no great wish to suppress delinquency.18 The main objective of the penal system is breaking this continuum of lower-class illegalism and the organization of a world of delinquency. There are two instruments for this. On the one hand, an ideological instrument: the theory of the delinquent as social enemy. This is no longer someone who struggles against the law, who wishes to evade power, but someone who is at war with every member of society. And the suddenly monstrous face the criminal assumes at the end of the eighteenth century, in literature and in penal theorists, corresponds to this need to break lower-class illegalism

But if the same man is in a quiet corner of a bar, drinking alone, he will get more depressed. Now there’s nothing to distract him. Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.2 Here’s another example. One of the central observations of myopia theory is that drunkenness has its greatest effect in situations of “high conflict”—where there are two sets of considerations, one near and one far, that are in opposition. So, suppose that you are a successful professional comedian. The world thinks you are very funny. You think you are very funny. If you get drunk, you don’t think of yourself as even funnier. There’s no conflict over your hilariousness that alcohol can resolve. But suppose you think you are very funny and the world generally doesn’t. In fact, whenever you try to entertain a group with a funny story, a friend pulls you aside the next morning and gently discourages you from ever doing it again. Under normal circumstances, the thought of that awkward conversation with your friend keeps you in check. But when you’re drunk? The alcohol makes the conflict go away. You no longer think about the future corrective feedback regarding your bad jokes. Now it is possible for you to believe that you are actually funny. When you are drunk, your understanding of your true self changes. This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped-down, distilled version of their sober self—without any of the muddying effects of social nicety and propriety. You got the real you. As the ancient saying goes, In vino veritas: “In wine there is truth.” But that’s backward. The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations. That is what it means to be ethical or productive or responsible. The good parent is someone who is willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer-term goals (to raise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer-term constraints on our behavior, it obliterates our true self. So who were the Camba, in reality? Heath says their society was marked by a singular lack of “communal expression.” They were itinerant farmworkers. Kinship ties were weak. Their daily labor tended to be solitary, the hours long.

In Victorian times, one of the more serious reasons for opposing Darwin was the fear that his theories would lead to the law of the jungle, the abandonment of ethical constraints in society.

In Victorian times, one of the more serious reasons for opposing Darwin was the fear that his theories would lead to the law of the jungle, the abandonment of ethical constraints in society. In nearly all of these cases, however, it is not so much science as its application (often by nonscientists) that has been under judgment.

Whether or not these ideas alone would solve any of the problems discussed, I look forward to the day when SLA is more widely recognized as the serious and socially responsive discipline I believe it can be. Chapters like this one (unpleasant for writer and assuredly some readers alike) would no longer be needed. One could instead concentrate on the genuine controversies and excitement in SLA and L3A: the roles of nature and nurture; special and general nativism; child-adult differences and the possibility of maturational constraints; cross-linguistic influence; acquisition and socialization; cognitive and social factors; resilience; stabilization; fossilization, and other putative mechanisms and processes in interlanguage change; the feasibility of pedagogical intervention; and, most of all, the development of viable theories.

Our basic understanding of evolutionary theory (how evolution works) in the early twenty-first century may be summed up as follows:   1. Mutation introduces genetic variation, which may introduce phenotypic variation. 2. Developmental processes can introduce broader phenotypic variation, which may be heritable. 3. Gene flow and genetic drift mix genetic variation (and potentially its phenotypic correlates) without regard to the function of those genes or traits. 4. Natural selection shapes genotypic and phenotypic variation in response to specific constraints and pressures in the environment. 5. At any given time one or more of the processes above can be affecting a population. 6. Dynamic organism-environment interaction can result in niche construction, changing pressures of natural selection and resulting in ecological inheritance. 7. Cultural patterns and contexts can impact gene flow and the pressures of natural selection, which in turn can affect genetic evolution (gene-culture coevolution). 8. Multiple inheritance systems (genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic) can all provide information and contexts that enable populations to change over time or avoid certain changes.

keeping the first station busy, and it’s similar to first-in, first-out scheduling. But of course, now everyone knows that you don’t release work based on the availability of the first station. Instead, it should be based on the tempo of how quickly the bottleneck resource can consume the work.” I just stare at him blankly. He continues, “Because of how Mark was releasing work, inventory kept piling up in front of our bottleneck, and jobs were never finished on time. Every day was an emergency. For years, we were awarded Best Customer of the Year from our air freight shipment company, because we were overnighting thousands of pounds of finished goods to angry customers almost every week.” He pauses and then says emphatically, “Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.” He continues, “In our case, our bottleneck was a heat treat oven, just like in Goldratt’s novel, The Goal. We also had paint-curing booths that later became constraints, too. By the time we froze the release of all new jobs, you couldn’t even see the bottleneck work centers because they were surrounded by huge piles of inventory. Even from up here!” Despite myself, I laugh with him. It’s obvious in hindsight, but I can imagine that to Mark, it was anything but obvious. “Look, thanks for the history lesson. But I learned most of this already in business school. I don’t see how this could possibly be relevant to managing IT Operations. IT is not like running a factory.” “Oh, really?” he turns to me, frowning intensely. “Let me guess. You’re going to say that IT is pure knowledge work, and so therefore, all your work is like that of an artisan. Therefore, there’s no place for standardization, documented work procedures, and all that high-falutin’ ‘rigor and discipline’ that you claimed to hold so near and dear.” I frown. I can’t figure out if he’s trying to convince me of something I already believe or trying to get me to accept an absurd conclusion. “If you think IT Operations has nothing to learn from Plant Operations, you’re wrong.

Humans start out, much like other primates, relying on a massively parallel system of cognition, made up of a set of domain-specific heuristics that have evolved as a way of addressing particular problems that presented themselves with some frequency in the environment of evolutionary adaptation. All primates engage in social learning (whereby, instead of engaging in trial-and-error learning, they look to the behavior of conspecifics for clues as to the best strategy). Humans, however, hit on a particular heuristic-imitation with a conformist bias-that has significant adaptive value. In particular, the fidelity of the copying strategy is sufficiently great that it enables cumulative cultural change, and thus creates a cultural inheritance system.28 It also creates the preconditions for genuine rule-following to emerge, and hence for the development of norms-implicit-in-practice. This creates the possibility of semantic intentionality, and propositionally differentiated language (whereby the meaning of propositions becomes independent of their immediate context of use). Thus language develops, initially, as an external social practice. However, the enhancement of our cognitive abilities associated with this "language upgrade" leads individuals to increased dependence on language as a tool for planning and controlling their own behavior. Thus the intentional planning system develops as the seat of conscious, rational action. Theories of rational action (such as decision theory) are not psychological theories that attempt to model underlying "springs of action." They are essentially expressive theories, which attempt to work out the normative commitments that are implicitly undertaken whenever we act on the basis of our beliefs and preferences. Thus they are part of the toolkit that is provided to us by the language upgrade.

Georgi M. Derluguian's Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus tells the extraordinary story of Musa Shanib from Abkhazia, the leading intellectual of this turbulent region whose incredible career passed from Soviet dissident intellectual through democratic political reformer and Muslim fundamentalist war leader up to respected professor of philosophy, his entire career marked by the strange admiration for Pierre Bourdieu's thought. There are two ways to approach such a figure. The first reaction is to dismiss it as local eccentricity, to treat it with benevolent irony - "what a strange choice, Bourdieu - who knows what this folkloric guy sees in Bourdieu...". The second reaction is to directly assert the universal scope of theory - "see how universal theory is: every intellectual from Paris to Chechenia and Abkhazia can debate his theories..." The true task, of course, is to avoid both these options and to assert the universality of a theory as the result of a hard theoretical work and struggle, a struggle that is not external to theory: the point is not (only) that Shanib had to do a lot of work to break the constraints of his local context and penetrate Bourdieu - this appropriation of Bourdieu by an Abkhazian intellectual also affects the substance of the theory itself, transposing it into a different universe. Did - mutatis mutandis - Lenin not do something similar with Marx? The shift of Mao with regard to Lenin AND Stalin concerns the relationship between the working class and peasants: both Lenin and Stalin were deeply distrustful towards the peasants, they saw as one of the main tasks of the Soviet power to break the inertia of the peasants, their substantial attachment to land, to "proletarize" them and thus fully expose them to the dynamics of modernization - in clear contrast to Mao who, in his critical notes on Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (from 1958) remarked that "Stalin's point of view /.../ is almost altogether wrong. The basic error is mistrust of the peasants." The theoretical and political consequences of this shift are properly shattering: they imply no less than a thorough reworking of Marx's Hegelian notion of proletarian position as the position of "substanceless subjectivity," of those who are reduced to the abyss of their subjectivity.

Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (GTOC),

which is to subordinate the constraint. In the Theory of Constraints, this is typically implemented by something called Drum-Buffer-Rope. In

there is good reason to believe that rational choice theory permits greater perspicacity when it comes to articulating the structure of decision in nonsocial contexts, but that it fails to offer comparable illumination when it comes to analyzing social interaction. Indeed, many of the arguments that have been used to immunize rational choice theory against the sort of anomalies detected by experimental game theorists have the effect of obscuring, rather than elucidating, the intentional structure of social interactions.

Leverage points can prove especially effective when the change is directed at a constraint in the system (a key idea in complexity theory).

Hegel believed that progress is ultimately furthered by the person who is out of step with the majority. Only this person, the genuine nonconformist, really experiences the constraints on freedom. Only this person is in the position of questioning the prevailing understandings of happiness. For

While the foundation of DevOps can be seen as being derived from Lean, the Theory of Constraints, and the Toyota Kata movement, many also view DevOps as the logical continuation of the Agile software journey that began in 2001.

MMT helps us to see why countries that fix their exchange rates, like Argentina did until 2001, or that take on debt denominated in a foreign currency, like Venezuela has done, undermine their monetary sovereignty and subject themselves to the kinds of constraints faced by other currency users,

The Recipe for Success presents guidelines for a new manager adopting an existing team. Following the recipe enables quick improvement with low levels of team resistance. I want to acknowledge here the direct influence of Donald Reinertsen, who gave me the first two and the last steps in the recipe, and the indirect influence of Eli Goldratt, whose writings on the Theory of Constraints and its Five Focusing Steps greatly influenced steps four and five. The six steps in the recipe are Focus on Quality Reduce Work-in-Progress Deliver Often Balance Demand against Throughput Prioritize Attack Sources of Variability to Improve Predictability

Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion. Astonishing, but true! Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.

prioritizes human outcomes while at the same time recognizing and respecting our economy’s real resource constraints.

The theory developed in this book is a rationalist, strategic choice theory. It takes the perspective of a state that faces an international environment that presents constraints and opportunities.

Preindustrial living standards are predictable based on knowledge of disease and environment. Differences in social energy across societies were muted by the Malthusian constraints. They had minimal impacts on living conditions. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, we have entered a strange new world in which economic theory is of little use in understanding differences in income across societies, or the future income in any specific society. Wealth and poverty are a matter of differences in local social interactions that are magnified, not dampened, by the economic system, to produce feast or famine.

In late 2008, one of my business partners, Clayton Christensen offered his opinion that the recession would have an “unmitigated positive impact on innovation” because “when the tension is greatest and resources are most limited, people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.” This theory is supported by the Kaufmann Foundation statistic that “51 percent of the Fortune 500 companies began during a recession or bear market or both.” Whether launching a business or pursuing a dream, there are many high-profile instances in which a lack of resources ultimately proved to be a boon, rather than a bane. If we dig a bit, each of us can uncover examples among friends and family, and ourselves. Would most children have as many opportunities as they do in sports, music, or other extracurricular activities without parents, mothers in particular, who are accomplished at bartering as a way to stretch limited family budgets? Would kids have as many chances to explore their interests if their parents weren’t so adept at arranging for carpooling, chaperoning, and borrowing, thus enabling their kids to participate? Without the constraints of time, money, and health, would the online retailer Shabby Apple exist? (For a reminder of how that business came to be, see chapter 5.) If my parents could have paid for college, would I have caught an early glimpse of corporate life during the Silicon Valley heyday? Would I have ever set foot on Wall Street had I not needed to work to put my husband through school? All of us have had the opportunity to bootstrap if we look hard enough. Men seem to know how to do this in the business world: 88 percent of the founders of Entrepreneur magazine’s Hot 500 were men. But I wonder if women aren’t better at bootstrapping than we think we are. Chronically under resourced (whether due to the gender pay gap or ceding our resources to conform to societal expectations), women continually feel the tension of having too little budget and too little time. Because of this tension, we are expert at rethinking how to get things done. Many of us know how to turn scarcity into opportunity.

DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods.

All the evidence from the science of complexity says that given certain clear parameters...communities or teams will become self-organizing. They will be attracted to certain flowing states of organization natural to the people who make them up. In complexity theory, these flowing states are poetically called strange attractors. ... A work team made up of collaborating individuals would...have, if you could measure and plot creativity, failure, and success, a strange attractor that depicted the edges and patterns of the team's behavior. This pattern would be constrained by the forces operating within the company and outside in the market, but it would be most affected by the focus and vision of the team. A strong vision and purpose acts as a kind of strange attractor, allowing individual creativity while acting as a natural constraint to behavior that is detrimental to the team. Without repressive rules, then, a cohesive team with a strong sense of its mission, ethics, and tasks can be allowed a lot of leeway to develop its own approach to problems.

Eliyahu Goldratt introduced the Theory of Constraints in his must-read book, The Goal.

According to the Theory of Constraints, a business process can only operate as fast as its slowest part. Therefore, if you want to improve the overall output of your business process, you seek out the highest priority constraint, open it up, and the entire business will now perform at the speed of the next biggest constraint.

Art Ocain is a business leader, investor, writer, and DevOps advocate from Pennsylvania, the United States who specializes in the field of programming and cybersecurity. He focuses on using the theory of constraints and applying constraint management to all areas of business including sales, finance, planning, billing, and all areas of operations. Ocain has a Mathematics degree from the University of Maryland and a Business degree from the University of the People. And he is also certified by many renowned organizations like CISM from ISACA, CCNA from Cisco, MCSE from Microsoft, Security Administrator from Azure, Six Sigma, Scrum, and many more. Ocain is responsible for leading many teams toward revolutionary change through his DevOps principles, no matter the type of company or team. So far, he has worked in a lot of companies as a project manager, a President, a COO, a CTO, and an incident response coordinator. Along with this, Ocain is a blog writer and public speaker. He loves to write and share his knowledge and has given presentations at SBDC (Small Business Development Center) and Central PA Chamber of Commerce. Ocain shares his thoughts and information about his upcoming events on sites like MePush, LinkedIn, Slideshare, Quora, and Microsoft Tech Community. Throughout his career, Ocain has been a coach and a mentor to many people and has helped develop companies and build brands.

Peter Drucker, the inventor of Management by Objectives (MBO), Eliahu Goldrat, the creator of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) and Edward Demming, the man who gave the world Total Quality Management (TQM).

When we embrace our constraints, we begin to scale our work based on results, not theory or trends.

Theory of Constraints by Eli Goldratt called, “It’s Not Luck”.

a study that some colleagues and I (RG)18 conducted a few years ago suggests that way pitchers are given advance information about hitters can influence how they handle pressure. It has become common in baseball to give pitchers a “heat map” representing a particular hitter’s batting average for pitch locations throughout the strike zone. While it has been shown that athletes can use this type of information to improve performance,19,20 it also has the potential to change how athletes respond to pressure. The theory of ironic processes21 proposes that pressure will cause a skilled performer to maintain a movement profile typical of an expert but act as though he or she has a different goal: achieving a result that was intentionally avoided (e.g., throwing a pitch into one of a batter’s high average, hot zones). In other words, showing a pitcher where NOT to throw the ball might produce a “don’t think about pink elephants” kind of effect. To test this, we compared pitching performance for two groups: one group that was shown only their target (i.e., a cold zone) and a group was shown the target and an ironic (avoid, hot) zone. Performance was measured in low pressure (just pitching) and high pressure (crowd, monetary incentive for control) conditions. Consistent with the ironic process theory, the two-zone group missed their target more often, but not because they were wild and erratic in their delivery. This occurred because they threw significantly more pitches into the hot zone as compared to when they were not under pressure. Thus, we have two suggestions here. First, advance information should show the goal targets (cold zones) and not include things we want the pitcher to avoid. Second, this type of advance information should be included and manipulated in some practice activities. For example, in the Sniper Challenge described above, pitchers could be given different zones they are trying to target indicated using different types of advance information displays/graphics. This will allow the athlete to get practice at setting their intentions based on this type of information.

A half century of neoliberalism has brought the world to the brink of collapse. Only concerted effort and cooperation by the world’s governments provides any chance of survival. Understanding MMT does not make this easy. But it helps us to recognize what the true constraints are: resources, initiative, politics, imagination.

The evidence is plain to see all around us: in an era of multiple pandemics that threaten the continued existence of human life on planet earth, we are stymied by imaginary constraints concocted by economists.

Institutions, together with the standard constraints of economic theory, determine the opportunities in a society. Organization are created to take advantage of those opportunities, and, as the organizations evolve, they alter the institutions. The resultant path of institutional change is shaped by (1) the lock-in that comes from the symbiotic relationship between institutions and the organizations that have evolved as a consequence of the incentive structure provided by those institutions and (2) the feedback process by which human beings perceive and react to changes in the opportunity set.

Time is nonrenewable. Energy is finite. Productivity is limited.

Observations from experiments such as this one led Dijksterhuis and his collaborators to introduce unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue.

MMT recognizes that finance is not a limited resource. It is manufactured and created in the act of spending. In the modern world, the exclusive monopoly to issue the currency endows governments with unparalleled spending power. For MMT, that the issuer can spend without technical constraints is a rather trivial observation. What MMT stresses is that taxes and borrowing cannot pre-fund the issuer of the currency, as the currency must be provided before it can be used for tax collections or bond purchases. The substantive question for MMT then is how to deploy this spending power for achieving the two central macroeconomic goals: full employment and price stability.

relations.50 The idea of collective child-rearing was not unique to kibbutzim. It has been periodically attempted as a desired social disruption since antiquity. Plato believed that raising children communally would result in children treating all men as their fathers and thus more respectfully.51 Communist societies have also been associated with collective child-rearing; the family is seen as a threat to state ideology because it fosters a sense of belonging to a family unit, and totalitarian ideology requires that family allegiance be subordinated to allegiance to the party or state. Liberal political theory has also struggled with the issue of the family being an obstacle to an egalitarian society (for example, because child care and family life generally impose greater constraints on women).52 But attempts to fundamentally restructure or minimize the bond between parent and child have very rarely, if ever, endured.53 While mild forms of collective child-rearing are found in cultures all around the world (and in some other mammalian species, as we will see in chapter 7), they typically involve forms of alloparental care, whereby relatives share child-care duties. Dormitory sleeping arrangements for infants (of the kind initially attempted by the kibbutzim) are extremely rare. A 1971 survey of 183 societies around the world found that none maintained such a system.54 As in many utopian communities, the organization of child-rearing was motivated largely by adult imperatives. If men and women were to be treated truly equally, collective parenting might be seen as an obvious structural necessity, regardless of its implications for individual children and their development. Historian Steven Mintz noted in Huck’s Raft, his sweeping work on American childhood, that almost every innovation in child welfare in the United States, including orphanages and subsidized child care, has been driven primarily by adult concerns. Of secondary importance were philosophical and pragmatic convictions about what was best for children.55 As radical as communes may be in some key respects, they generally play by adult rules in regard to children, whose needs and concerns have never been, as far as I can tell, the primary motivation for any utopian community (even though some of them had amazing schools and treated children kindly). Setting up utopias seems to be like sex in at least one way: it is oriented to adult satisfaction.

Representation is a process of informational triangulation. Its aim is the specification of distal stimuli. It achieves that aim by corralling the output of multiple information channels integrated at their point of confluence. The integration process, in short, disambiguates individual information channels via the mutual constraints each channel provides others. The specificity won thereby falls on a continuum from the highly unspecific (simple transducers, little integrative depth) to the highly specific (subtle transducers, manifold integration).

A morality in the broad sense would be a general, all-inclusive theory of conduct: the morality to which someone subscribed would be whatever body of principles he allowed ultimately to guide or determine his choices of action. In the narrow sense, a morality is a system of a particular sort of constraints on conduct — ones whose central task is to protect the interests of persons other than the agent and which present themselves to an agent as checks on his natural inclinations or spontaneous tendencies to act. In this narrow sense, moral considerations would be considerations from some limited range, and would not necessarily include everything that a man allowed to determine what he did. In the second sense, someone could say quite deliberately, 'I admit that morality requires that I should do such-and-such, but I don't intend to: for me other considerations here overrule the moral ones.

During much of modern moral philosophy the predominant systematic theory has been some form of utilitarianism…Those who criticized them [i.e. the great utilitarians such as Hume, Smith and Mill] often did so on a much narrower front. They pointed out the obscurities of the principle of utility and noted the apparent incongruities between many of its implications and our moral sentiments. But they failed, I believe, to construct a workable and systematic moral conception to oppose it. The outcome is that we often seem forced to choose between utilitarianism and intuitionism. Most likely we finally settle upon a variant of the utility principle circumscribed and restricted in certain ad hoc ways by intuitionistic constraints. Such a view is not irrational; and there is no assurance that we can do better. But this is no reason not to try.

Reconsidering Karl Manx's emphasis on the framework of constraints or historical conditions which determine an individual's actions, Louis Althusser has argued that we do not pre-exist as free subjects: on the contrary, we are constituted as such by ideology. His central thesis is that individuals are 'interpellated' or 'called forth' as subjects by ideology, and that interpellation is achieved through a compelling mixture of recognition and identification. This notion is important for any thorough examination of identity politics, bécause it demonstrates how ideology not only positions individuals in society but also confers on them their sense of identity. In other words, it shows how one's identity is already constituted by ideology itself rather than simply by resistance to it.

There were a few other precedents, but they too had never taken hold. For example, the prominent (and for the most part, quite traditional) Princeton economist William Baumol had proposed an alternative to the traditional (normative) theory of the firm (which assumes profit maximization). He postulated that firms maximize their size, measured for instance by sales revenue, subject to a constraint that profits have to meet some minimum level. I think sales maximization may be a good descriptive model of many firms. In fact, it might be smart for a CEO to follow this strategy, since CEO pay oddly seems to depend as much on a firm’s size as it does on its profits, but if so that would also constitute a violation of the theory that firms maximize value.

One could take this connection further and draw a parallel between Satanism and the so-called “critical theory” pioneered by the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School sought to dispel a traditional/Christian understanding of society and instead desired to set society free from the constraints of historical Western culture. As Max Horkheimer noted, the goal of critical theory is “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”628 These “circumstances” are the traditional Western institutions and moral norms that have held together the Judeo-Christian world for millennia. For culture-focused Marxists, these institutions had to be dismantled. Literally speaking, to hell with them.

Page 61-2 ... Rome expanded rapidly ... and became master over the entire Mediterranean Basin. It then had unlimited resources in terms of land, money, and slaves. It collected taxes or tribute throughout its empire and was able to transfer to the central capital massive quantities of foodstuffs and manufactured items. The peasants and the artisans of Italy saw their economic base disappear as this Mediterranean economy was "globalized" by the political domination of Rome. The society was polarized between, on the one hand, a mass of economically useless plebeians and, on the other, a predatory plutocracy. A minority gorged with wealth oversaw the remaining proletarianized population. The middle-classes collapsed, a process that brought about the end of the republic and the beginning of the political form known as "empire" in conformity with the observations made by Aristotle about the importance of intermediate social classes for the stability of political systems. Since one could not eliminate the plebeians, intractable but geographically central as they were, they came to be nourished and distracted at the empire's expense with "bread and circuses." Page 64-5: The positive American trade balance, when only "advanced technology" is counted, dropped from 35 billion dollars in 1990 to 5 billion in 2001 and had disappeared entirely to become one more element in the overall trade deficit in January 2002. This fall in economic strength is not compensated for by the activities of American-based multinationals. Since 1998 the profits that they bring back into the country amount to less than what foreign companies that have set up shop in the United States are taking back to their own countries. Page 68: In conformity with classical economic theory, the general opening up of commercial exchange has brought about an increase in inequality throughout the world. This general exchange tends to introduce into each country the same disparities in revenue that exist at the level of the whole planet. ... The compression of worker revenues caused by free trade revives the traditional dilemma of capitalism that has now spread across the globe: low salaries do not allow for the absorption of increases in production. Page 17: In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation's wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage.

Here the rule-utilitarian believes that the only justifiable rules are ones that will promote the greatest happiness, when generally adhered to in a deontic fashion. Thus the rule-utilitarian rejects "deontology" as a theory of moral justification, but accepts deontic constraints as an essential element of moral action.

While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Consequences are governed by natural law. —Stephen Covey

Dr. Goldratt first introduced the concept of a Mafia Offer in his book It’s Not Luck (Goldratt, 1994, 133). Later, he defined a Mafia Offer as “an offer they can’t refuse” (Goldratt, 2008, 67). But in writing, he more frequently refers to it as an unrefusable offer

The plausibility of this approach has a lot more to do with the popularity of certain sorts of philosophical theories of mind than with any sort of empirical psychological evidence. It's not as though actual human infants learn how to deal with "easy stuff" like tables and balls first, then go on to deal with more complex subjects, like their mothers. They learn to deal with people first. It is in fact a commonplace observation in developmental psychology that human infants begin by treating all objects in their environment as essentially social, and only much later learn to separate out the animate from the inanimate, and the nonhuman from the human. Thus it is quite possible that we do not "build up" from reasoning in nonsocial to social contexts, but rather, we "scale back" our reasoning when we drop down from social to nonsocial contexts.

Not only is there no a priori reason to suspect that the problem of order should be resolvable within the framework of an instrumental conception of rationality, there is good reason to think that it should not be. In the background of the instrumentalist strategy is an assumption that, on reflection, can easily be seen to be dubious. The idea that decision theory should provide the "foundations" for game theory amounts to the assumption that all of the "equipment" a rational agent brings to bear on the world is already in place and deployed in nonsocial contexts.

Hinduism perhaps is always better lived first, and then understood; like any path of wisdom and spirit. Hinduism is often described as a way of life rather than a religion, perhaps, for that reason. We do not begin with a theory or doctrine that we then try to bend the world to conform to. We are, one might say, ‘spiritual anarchists’. We are ever evolving, ever free. Our constraints on occasion have been responses to history and circumstances rather than our own effort to impose our will onto others; in our philosophy, we have no Others, no reviled category for non-believers. We can be atheists, and Hindu. We can be monotheists and polytheists. But in all our freedom, we do, still, have a sense of a center of gravity; and that is the sense of You, Alone, around which we have created all our philosophy, culture, art, science, and indeed civilization too.

For strict fundamentalists of the Bible, the theory and what follows from it seal them off from unwanted information, and in that way their actions are invested with meaning, clarity, and, they believe, moral authority. Those who reject the Bible’s theory and who believe, let us say, in the theory of Science are also protected from unwanted information. Their theory, for example, instructs them to disregard information about astrology, dianetics, and creationism, which they usually label as medieval superstition or subjective opinion. Their theory fails to give any guidance about moral information and, by definition, gives little weight to information that falls outside the constraints of science.

As commended by ancient and religious traditions alike, liberty is not liberation from constraint but rather our capacity to govern appetite and thus achieve a truer form of liberty—liberty from enslavement to our appetites and avoidance of depletion of the world.

Here is where the real novelty lies: we let each distinct subsystem develop according to rules for adaptation, and our role as designers is merely that of facilitator. Namely, we are not going to dictate its design using any preconceived ideas or images (a shocking suggestion for contemporary practitioners), only search for the possibilities that satisfy the constraints of use, site, environment, etc. In this way, the components we have to work with will, in a real sense, “assemble themselves”. This phenomenon is called self-organization — a very important topic that we discuss extensively in our 2011 essay “Frontiers of Design Science: Self-Organization”.

Here is where the real novelty lies: we let each distinct subsystem develop according to rules for adaptation, and our role as designers is merely that of facilitator. Namely, we are not going to dictate its design using any preconceived ideas or images (a shocking suggestion for contemporary practitioners), only search for the possibilities that satisfy the constraints of use, site, environment, etc. In this way, the components we have to work with will, in a real sense, “assemble themselves”. This phenomenon is called self-organization

Theory of Constraints, Lean production or the Toyota Production System, and Total Quality Management.

When we know how to do something, it’s hard to remember what it was like not knowing how to do it, even if that was just a few minutes ago.

Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights Consider the following excerpt from a 2006 paper that appeared in the journal Science: The scientific literature has emphasized the benefits of conscious deliberation in decision making for hundreds of years… The question addressed here is whether this view is justified. We hypothesize that it is not. Lurking in this bland statement is a bold claim. The authors of this study, led by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, set out to prove that some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over. Dijksterhuis’s team isolated this effect by giving subjects the information needed for a complex decision regarding a car purchase. Half the subjects were told to think through the information and then make the best decision. The other half were distracted by easy puzzles after they read the information, and were then put on the spot to make a decision without having had time to consciously deliberate. The distracted group ended up performing better. Observations from experiments such as this one led Dijksterhuis and his collaborators to introduce unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue. UTT hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking. Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions. The implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges. A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.

They found that HA showed deficits only at short (1 sec), but not long (3 sec) presentations. During short presentations, higher scores on the difficulty describing feelings (DDF) facet of alexithymia were associated with poorer detection of negative expressions, suggesting lower perceptual sensitivity under time constraints; no evidence for a response bias was found.

the goal of Queer Theory is to break the brainwashing program so you can free yourself from yourself (as society allegedly demands you to be). The goal is to break off the societal chains on your soul so you can realize who you really are “on the inside.” To do this, you start queering society, breaking all traditions, rules, and norms. Then, free from the constraints of an illegitimate order, you become queer.