Eliyahu M. Goldratt Quotes

Tell me how you measure me and I’ll tell you how I will behave.

For a foreman, heat-treat seems like a very small kingdom, not much of a prize. There is nothing intrinsically attractive about running that operation, and having only two people to manage makes it seem like no big deal. To prevent it from seeming like a demotion to them, I make a point to go down there periodically on each of the shifts. In talking to the foreman, I drop some rather direct hints that the rewards will be great for anyone who can improve the output of heat-treated parts.

My system does not make sense at all, but by God it’s working.

If the goal is to make money, then (putting it in terms Jonah might have used), an action that moves us toward making money is productive. And an action that takes away from making money is non-productive.

So I’ve got limits on how fast I can go — both my own (I can only go so fast for so long before I fall over and pant to death) and those of the others on the hike. However, there is no limit on my ability to slow down. Or on anyone else’s ability to slow down. Or stop. And if any of us did, the line would extend indefinitely. What’s happening isn’t an averaging out of the fluctuations in our various speeds, but an accumulation of the fluctuations. And mostly it’s an accumulation of slowness — because dependency limits the opportunities for higher fluctuations. And that’s why the line is spreading. We can make the line shrink only by having everyone in the back of the line move much faster than Ron’s average over some distance.

[Throughput is the] rate at which the system generates money through sales.

What I’m telling you is, productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is,” he says.

productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its goal is not productive.

A third way to waste a bottleneck’s time is to make it work on parts you don’t need.” “You mean spare parts?” asks Bob. “I mean anything that isn’t within the current demand,

Quality alone cannot be the goal. It’s important. But it’s not the goal.

Throughput,” he says, “is the rate at which the system generates money through sales.

Somewhere in the scientific method lies the answer for the needed management techniques. It is obvious.

"Well, I don’t. Not absolutely. But adopting "making money’’ as the goal of a manufacturing organization looks like a pretty good assumption. Because, for one thing, there isn’t one item on that list that’s worth a damn if the company isn’t making money.

They’re measurements which express the goal of making money perfectly well, but which also permit you to develop operational rules for running your plant,” he says. “There are three of them. Their names are throughput, inventory and operational expense.

What is the real goal? Nobody here has even asked anything that basic.