Alex, the goal is not to reduce operational expense by itself. The goal is not to improve one measurement in isolation. The goal is to reduce operati… - Eliyahu M. Goldratt

I’m talking about a production employee who is idle because there is no product to be worked on.” “Yes, that’s always bad,” I say. “Why?” I chuckle. “Isn’t it obvious? Because it’s a waste of money! What are we supposed to do, pay people to do nothing? We can’t afford to have idle time. Our costs are too high to tolerate it. It’s inefficiency, it’s low productivity — no matter how you measure it.” He leans forward as if he’s going to whisper a big secret to me. “Let me tell you something,” he says. “A plant in which everyone is working all the time is very inefficient.

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.

When a proto-type — a new initiative — doesn't work, we face two alternatives: one is to bitch about reality and the other is to harvest the gift it just gave us, the knowledge of what has to be corrected.