One of the toughest things in life is knowing what you don’t know! How’s that for one of the world’s top oxymorons? [quotes]By definition, we can’t know what we don’t know, can we?[/quotes]
A quick path to discovering the gaps in your knowledge is to find somebody who knows more than you and get help, but that’s not always possible. The next best thing is finding that knowledge in a book.
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Almost unbelievably, this book is written in the format of a novel, and it has sold more than 6 million copies! While occasionally dry and somewhat corny (James Bond it is not), this book will take you on a journey that will have you seeing things differently in almost any business.
Goldratt is an expert in many management theories, but particularly the theory of constraints. A business’s growth can be hampered by many things, some of which we may never think of unless we learn to think differently. For example, the owner thinks sales is the problem, so you improve the sales only to discover that production can’t keep up … Oops! Or production is pumping out blue widgets when the world wants red.
Those are very simplistic examples, but sometimes the problem may be as simple as that. Maybe the business needs to invest in plant workers, not sales. Maybe production is fine, but the business needs more people on the support lines for implementation.
Find your true bottleneck and your business could boom in short order. Fail to identify the correct problem, and you could find yourself looking for a new career in an even shorter timeframe.
- Recommendation by Ben Pritchett