Target the Constraint

• You need to identify your biggest constraint (bottleneck), then apply all of your effort to improving that area of your business.
• Example: "Let's say you're running a donut stand at a county fair. One person cooks the donuts, which takes 60 seconds, and the other person takes the orders, which takes 90 seconds. The stand is busy all day, with a long line of customers waiting."
  • If you bought a new donut fryer that cut your cooking time in half, you wouldn't be a single second faster. You wouldn't sell even one more donut.
  • Why? Because the constraint is how fast you can take orders.
  • But if you hired another order taker, the constraint would switch over to donut cooking time, at which point it may make sense to buy that new donut fryer.
• "Constraints don't go away. When you relieve one constraint, you improve the system AND another constraint takes its place. There's always a constraint."
• "Investments that aren't directed at the constraint might do nothing to improve the system as a whole."

Eliminating and Recycling Waste (DOWNTIME)

• One of the best ways to Restack Resources on your Leverage Point is to eliminate waste. In the world of lean thinking, "Waste is anything that doesn't add value to your work in the customer's eyes."
• "Many organizations use the acronym DOWNTIME—inspired by the Toyota Production System, which for operations researchers is sort of like the Holy of Holies—to capture eight possible categories of waste."
• "To illustrate all eight elements, let's analyze waste in a hypothetical bakery:
  • Defects: Burned cookies, sad shriveled croissants
  • Overproduction: The donuts thrown out at the end of the day
  • Waiting: The worker twiddling thumbs, waiting for dough to rise
  • Nonutilized talent: A cake decorator washing dishes
  • Transportation: The flour bag being stored too far from the mixer, requiring it to be moved back and forth constantly
  • Inventory: Overbought milk that went bad
  • Motion (the people version of Transportation): The counter staff's thousands of unnecessary steps going back and forth from the register to the distant coffeepot
  • Excess processing: Birthday cakes being iced using an obscure French technique that pleases the pastry chef but goes unnoticed by the customer, who just wants their kid's name spelled right
• "If we can spot waste, we can immediately recycle those resources—money, energy, labor, materials—to push harder on our Leverage Points. And there's no downside! Because the customer (by definition) did not value the things that you cut back. That's why waste is worth obsessing about."
• "Micromanagement is another near-universal kind of waste."

Tap Into Existing Motivation

• "Many leaders treat 'change initiatives' as something to be hatched in private and then foisted on employees. When they resist, the leaders act surprised and ask, 'How do I get people to buy in?'"
• "'Buy in' is code for: How do I get people to want what I want, rather than what they want? But that's backward. If you want to get out of a rut and leap forward, go where the energy is. Tap motivation."
• "Ask yourself, Which one of these interventions would be most enthusiastically embraced by my people? It's really not more complicated than that."
• "Our goal is to tap motivation to yield progress, and then use the evidence of that progress to motivate others, whose kindled enthusiasm can then be tapped for still more energy. That cycle can fuel your forward movement. Progress is the spark that makes believers of skeptics."

Other Practical Ideas

• Whenever setting out on a new project, ask a simple but powerful question: "What's the goal of the goal?"
  • What are you really trying to achieve?
  • How will you know whether your mission has ultimately succeeded or failed?
  • "Take a careful and even skeptical look at the goals you're pursuing."
• Ask the "Miracle Question" used by some therapists:
  • "Imagine that in the middle of the night tonight, as you are sleeping, a miracle happens...the problem you are stressed about has been solved. Poof! Gone. But the miracle happened when you were sleeping, so when you first wake up, you have no way of knowing it happened. What are the first things you notice, as you start your day, that reveal to you that the miracle happened?"
• "Early in your pursuit of your goal, look backwards at what you have achieved; toward the end, look forward." -Miguel Brendl
  • Early on, seeing what you've accomplished so far will motivate you enough to keep going.
  • Later, it'll be more motivating to switch your focus to how close you are to the finish line.
• "You get what you celebrate." -Frank Blake, former CEO of Home Depot
  • "One of the best tools for sustaining motivation is recognition." -Dan Heath
  • "Your free fuel is praise and recognition. You come in and tell me how you're praising and recognizing your people to get where we need to go. And then we'll talk about resources." -Frank Blake