Eric's Blogs

Today I'm posting my mini reviews on three TOC related books: "Goldratt's Theory of Constraints", "Necessary but not Sufficient" and "Critical Chain".

Dettmers book "Goldratt's Theory of Constraints" on the "Thinking Process" is a must have companion book that gives you the basis for using the process yourself. The book goes in depth in all the topics it covers. It's really like a classroom book and well worth reading.

In "Necessary but not Sufficient", we follow the move towards "value" of an ERP systems supplier and how, in parallel they have evolved their ERP system into a system for management by TOC.

All Goldratts books are good, but "Critical Chain" is even more so. I've learnt quite a bit about the complexities of managing in a multi-project environment while reading this book. While some might argue that anyone who has managed multiple projects should know this, I suspect that most of it remains unknown to the vast majority of project managers. Otherwise, overrun projects would be anecdotal not the norm.

This book was cited quite a bit in another book I was reading called "The New Rules of Marketing and PR", which I will eventually get around to adding to my list of good Marketing books. It's going to be a nice change in subject area until I receive my new batch of books.

In the continuation of the TOC line of thought, I've started "Viable Vision". I'm also waiting for a new batch of four or five books related to this topic. Process improvement is one of the field for which I have considerable interest and TOC is quite interesting in that it does not look at local optimization but global optimization. I'm trying to figure out how it would apply a global service industry.

I've been reading lot's of business books lately so here is one that's closer to home about web usability. After a few minutes of scanning, it looks promising.

With this book I'm trying to learn more about the financial aspects of the Theory of Constraints so that I could explain to the bean counters why we might want to do things differently. Stay tuned...

The next book in my recently arrived pile of books: Zag. A book on branding that I've decided to buy after having read Brand Simple, which I liked very much. Actually, this is a short book and as far as I can tell it's in the same vein as Blue Ocean Strategy, which I also liked quite a lot.

I like books about process improvement. I've read quite a few about Lean & Six Sigma or Both. After having read The Goal I was ready to learn more about this Theory of Constraints so I ordered a new batch of books from Amazon. Ever noticed how these guys have cross-selling down to a science? Well anyways, I've started reading "It's Not Luck", which is the sequel to "The Goal". It's look promising though I don't really regard this book as a novel.