Velocity: Book Review
Velocity is written by a trio of folks who work for the AGI-Goldratt Institute, which brought us The Theory of Constraints with that now-famous book, The Goal. These folks have made the business novel a genre unto it's own. Heck, I'm writing one myself. Something about that novel format that makes for easy writing and (we authors hope) easy reading.
And this book is easy to read. You could probably get it done on a long air trip, certainly over a weekend. You can read it even more quickly if you take my advice to start at about page 150. Here's what you will have missed:
Amy has been promoted to President of a firm that just got bought by a conglomerate. Her boss is a jackass. Her jackass boss inflicted an Lean Six Sigma guy on her. She also has an MRP system, again, inflicted on her from the start, that (somehow) senses when a work center is underutilized, then schedules product for that work center...on its own...with no human intervention....and it can't be turned off. The two factories that Amy oversees have tons of problems that nobody seems to be able to fix, least of all the Lean Six Sigma guy. There's also a separate R and D office that has to approve designs or formulations or something for the plants but doesn't do it in a timely way.
Oh, yes...there's also Amy's budding love interest and a formerly married couple of managers at the R and D office that get it on in the lab every so often. If I recall correctly, there was a similar schtick in The Goal. Somehow, business novel writers got it in their heads that, because it was a novel, it had to include some sex and drugs and rock and roll. Here's a suggestion: leave that to Danielle Steele because you're no good at it.
So, there you go...skip to page 150, where everything of interest regarding Theory of Constraints starts.
What starts to happen at page 150? Well, things have gotten so damn bad that...Amy finally decides to get all the requisite parties together to do some...PLANNING! Now there's an idea! One kind of wonders why Amy (or anybody) didn't think of it when everything was just "every day" bad. No kidding, at no point before halfway through the book does Amy get everybody together and say, "Let's figure this out and develop a plan that we can all agree to."
And that's my primary problem with the book. The descriptions of operational issues and problems are good (for the most part). But I was continually nonplussed by the actions...and non-actions of the various protagonists. In that regard, the story line didn't seem very realistic much of the time.
First...Amy's promotion. Amy has been a middle level marketing type, recently promoted to an upper level marketing type. Suddenly, she's President of the subsidiary, a subsidiary that, everyone recognizes, has serious operating problems. Yes, it could happen, I guess.
Then there's the Six Sigma Lean guy. As I mentioned, he is sent to Amy by the top dog conglomerate jackass. He's a gung ho kind of guy, all focused on getting rid of variation and waste. So far so good. He jumps right in with...line balancing? And it's a line that the authors have made sure has a big, immutable constraint right in the middle of it, a heating/curing process step that takes anywhere between two and 23 hours, depending on the product specs. Oh, the Lean Six Sigma guy also spends several months training everybody in the company in lean. So, the lean six sigma implementation, as far as the reader can tell, consists of:
Then there's the IT. It's a ERP/MRP sort of thing called WINGS that, as mentioned, has the ability to tell when an operation isn't fully utilized, then schedules product to that operation, ordering material if need be. How does WINGS know when a work center is underutilized? That's not explained. What's also not explained is...why the hell would anyone ever, in their most hallucinatory states, EVER set up such a system? And it got me thinking, "Maybe I'm the one who's naive. Maybe such a monster really exists." If someone knows of such a system, I'd love to hear about it.
Finally, there's an important piece of the story that doesn't ring true, at least for this lean practitioner. While there is a lot of superficial attendance to various measures throughout the book, it's apparent that there is no "dashboard of metrics" used by anybody close to the project. Amy gets blindsided by different folks coming to her with disparate metrics and we're to believe that she doesn't have a firm set of her own. We're also to believe that this gung ho Lean Six Sigma guy is, for all practical purposes, averse to performance metrics other than those of the "micro" sort. Like the ratio of kaizen blitzes to total head count. (I know that's one that's near and dear to all you readers....right?) We're also to believe that the jackass CEO of Everything, who is continually flying his lieutenants all over the world for golf and drinks at the finest resorts (no, I'm not kidding) is digging into machine utilization at Amy's plants. The whole approach to measuring performance just didn't ring true for me. Again, maybe I'm just naive and folks really do go about things this way. But....kaizen blitzes as a percentage of total headcount? C'mon.
On the other hand, the descriptions of other operational conditions and problems ring true. The descriptions of what does and doesn't go on at R and D with respect to processes and culture are especially on the mark. I get the impression one or more of the authors have a good bit of experience in this arena. Bottom line is that, apart from the trysting in the labs, the R and D part of the story is well presented, as is (most of) what does and doesn't go on in the plants themselves.
The book's subtitle is: "Combining Lean, Six Sigma, and The Theory of Constraints to Achieve Breakthrough Performance". A more honest subtitle would be: "Subordinating Lean and Six Sigma to The Theory of Constraints to Achieve Breakthrough Performance". And I don't even have in mind that subordinating lean and six sigma to TOC is necessarily a bad thing. It's just that you're not actually going to learn much about "combining" the three approaches. You will however read a lot about how lean and six sigma is inferior to TOC. Again, not that that would necessarily be a bad thing. But don't lead us to believe you're going to tell us how to combine the methods, then tell us that "combining" means "Do TOC as your primary approach and then do a little lean and six sigma around the edges....just so long as they don't get in the way of the real work."
Is the book worth reading? Yes...but just barely. You'll learn something about TOC, if you didn't already know it. You'll won't learn anything at all about lean or six sigma; it's presented in an inaccurate and mostly disparaging light. (I'm sure the authors would disagree with this. But it's a matter of damning by faint praise. The Lean Six Sigma guy is presented as having all the right knowledge, training, and experience. But he implements it in a way that a recent college grad would recognize as bogus. ) And you won't learn much about how to combine them.
But, if you do read it, start at page 150.
And this book is easy to read. You could probably get it done on a long air trip, certainly over a weekend. You can read it even more quickly if you take my advice to start at about page 150. Here's what you will have missed:
Amy has been promoted to President of a firm that just got bought by a conglomerate. Her boss is a jackass. Her jackass boss inflicted an Lean Six Sigma guy on her. She also has an MRP system, again, inflicted on her from the start, that (somehow) senses when a work center is underutilized, then schedules product for that work center...on its own...with no human intervention....and it can't be turned off. The two factories that Amy oversees have tons of problems that nobody seems to be able to fix, least of all the Lean Six Sigma guy. There's also a separate R and D office that has to approve designs or formulations or something for the plants but doesn't do it in a timely way.
Oh, yes...there's also Amy's budding love interest and a formerly married couple of managers at the R and D office that get it on in the lab every so often. If I recall correctly, there was a similar schtick in The Goal. Somehow, business novel writers got it in their heads that, because it was a novel, it had to include some sex and drugs and rock and roll. Here's a suggestion: leave that to Danielle Steele because you're no good at it.
So, there you go...skip to page 150, where everything of interest regarding Theory of Constraints starts.
What starts to happen at page 150? Well, things have gotten so damn bad that...Amy finally decides to get all the requisite parties together to do some...PLANNING! Now there's an idea! One kind of wonders why Amy (or anybody) didn't think of it when everything was just "every day" bad. No kidding, at no point before halfway through the book does Amy get everybody together and say, "Let's figure this out and develop a plan that we can all agree to."
And that's my primary problem with the book. The descriptions of operational issues and problems are good (for the most part). But I was continually nonplussed by the actions...and non-actions of the various protagonists. In that regard, the story line didn't seem very realistic much of the time.
First...Amy's promotion. Amy has been a middle level marketing type, recently promoted to an upper level marketing type. Suddenly, she's President of the subsidiary, a subsidiary that, everyone recognizes, has serious operating problems. Yes, it could happen, I guess.
Then there's the Six Sigma Lean guy. As I mentioned, he is sent to Amy by the top dog conglomerate jackass. He's a gung ho kind of guy, all focused on getting rid of variation and waste. So far so good. He jumps right in with...line balancing? And it's a line that the authors have made sure has a big, immutable constraint right in the middle of it, a heating/curing process step that takes anywhere between two and 23 hours, depending on the product specs. Oh, the Lean Six Sigma guy also spends several months training everybody in the company in lean. So, the lean six sigma implementation, as far as the reader can tell, consists of:
- Sending everybody to class, and
- Efforts on the part of the Lean Six Sigma guy, alone, to balance a line with a 23 hour process step in the middle of it.
Then there's the IT. It's a ERP/MRP sort of thing called WINGS that, as mentioned, has the ability to tell when an operation isn't fully utilized, then schedules product to that operation, ordering material if need be. How does WINGS know when a work center is underutilized? That's not explained. What's also not explained is...why the hell would anyone ever, in their most hallucinatory states, EVER set up such a system? And it got me thinking, "Maybe I'm the one who's naive. Maybe such a monster really exists." If someone knows of such a system, I'd love to hear about it.
Finally, there's an important piece of the story that doesn't ring true, at least for this lean practitioner. While there is a lot of superficial attendance to various measures throughout the book, it's apparent that there is no "dashboard of metrics" used by anybody close to the project. Amy gets blindsided by different folks coming to her with disparate metrics and we're to believe that she doesn't have a firm set of her own. We're also to believe that this gung ho Lean Six Sigma guy is, for all practical purposes, averse to performance metrics other than those of the "micro" sort. Like the ratio of kaizen blitzes to total head count. (I know that's one that's near and dear to all you readers....right?) We're also to believe that the jackass CEO of Everything, who is continually flying his lieutenants all over the world for golf and drinks at the finest resorts (no, I'm not kidding) is digging into machine utilization at Amy's plants. The whole approach to measuring performance just didn't ring true for me. Again, maybe I'm just naive and folks really do go about things this way. But....kaizen blitzes as a percentage of total headcount? C'mon.
On the other hand, the descriptions of other operational conditions and problems ring true. The descriptions of what does and doesn't go on at R and D with respect to processes and culture are especially on the mark. I get the impression one or more of the authors have a good bit of experience in this arena. Bottom line is that, apart from the trysting in the labs, the R and D part of the story is well presented, as is (most of) what does and doesn't go on in the plants themselves.
The book's subtitle is: "Combining Lean, Six Sigma, and The Theory of Constraints to Achieve Breakthrough Performance". A more honest subtitle would be: "Subordinating Lean and Six Sigma to The Theory of Constraints to Achieve Breakthrough Performance". And I don't even have in mind that subordinating lean and six sigma to TOC is necessarily a bad thing. It's just that you're not actually going to learn much about "combining" the three approaches. You will however read a lot about how lean and six sigma is inferior to TOC. Again, not that that would necessarily be a bad thing. But don't lead us to believe you're going to tell us how to combine the methods, then tell us that "combining" means "Do TOC as your primary approach and then do a little lean and six sigma around the edges....just so long as they don't get in the way of the real work."
Is the book worth reading? Yes...but just barely. You'll learn something about TOC, if you didn't already know it. You'll won't learn anything at all about lean or six sigma; it's presented in an inaccurate and mostly disparaging light. (I'm sure the authors would disagree with this. But it's a matter of damning by faint praise. The Lean Six Sigma guy is presented as having all the right knowledge, training, and experience. But he implements it in a way that a recent college grad would recognize as bogus. ) And you won't learn much about how to combine them.
But, if you do read it, start at page 150.
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