Hello TOC Flow Community! Last month I told you to exploit before you elevate. Southwest found the equivalent of sixteen aircraft in five minutes. There’s usually capacity already there, more than you think. But there’s something else I want to share. There's a question that sits underneath the whole exploit conversation, and it changes how much effort you should pour in. The Question Asked Less Often Where should your constraint be? Not where is it. Where should it be. Mos

Hello TOC Flow Community! There's a moment I've watched play out a few times: A team finally identifies its constraint. Everyone agrees on it. The energy in the room is good. And then, within about ten minutes, someone says "we just need to [add/buy]…. " The machine. The extra shift. The new hires. The software. It's the most natural reaction in the world, and it's almost always premature. Because in nearly every operation I walk into, the constraint is not running at anyth

Hello TOC Flow Community! I just finished reading David Epstein's new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better... It came out in May, hit the New York Times bestseller list, and it makes the kind of counterintuitive case that operational leaders need to hear. His thesis is simple. Constraints are where creativity, productivity, and breakthrough thinking come from. For those of us in the TOC world, that's not news. But the way Epstein documents it across writing,

Plant managers and Operations leaders tend to have the same instinct...If a machine isn't running, fix it. If a person isn't working, find them something to do. If a team has slack, fill it. It's the instinct that built modern operations. It's the instinct every supervisor, plant manager, and director was trained on. And in most operations, it's exactly what's preventing the business from flowing. The Step Nobody Actually Does If you recall from our Flow Solutions Training,

Every leadership team I talk to has a version of this story... Something is going wrong, so they take action. The action makes sense. Everyone agrees with it. And yet, six months later, the problem is still there, or worse. Why? Because the intuitive reaction often feeds the very cycle it was supposed to fix. Why Plausible Decisions Create Negative Outcomes If you recall from our Flow Solutions Training, we spend time mapping vicious cycles for a reason. The pattern goes so

Hello TOC Flow Community! Over the last few months we've explored how "Reset" helps us focus on the right constraint, and how "Scarcity" explains why smart people stay trapped in vicious cycles. This month, I want to connect those themes to something that most leadership teams of small and medium sized businesses struggle with: innovation. Most leaders I meet think innovation means creating something new. It doesn't. As Dr. Eli Goldratt defined it: "Value is created by

Hello TOC Flow Community! I just finished reading "Scarcity" by Sendhil Mullainathan, and it explains something we see every day in organizations: Intelligent leaders taking actions which intuitively they know aren't working. The book, by the way, is about the impact of scarcity to human behavior, so it goes way beyond the impact in our professional lives, but it's worth highlighting here how it relates to TOC's Systems Thinking paradigm. The Scarcity Trap Mullainathan des

👋 Hello TOC Flow Community! Happy New Year! I hope you are looking forward to the opportunities ahead and preparing for a great 2026. I read 40 books in 2025, and one that stood out to me was Dan Heath's new book Reset: How to Change What's Not Working. It reinforces everything we teach about focus and constraints. I highly recommend. Heath's core message resonates deeply with TOC: You can't change everything. You can't even change most things. But you can change th

Hello TOC Flow Community! December already? As we wrap up 2025, I want to share something that perfectly captures why we do what we do. 🔥Attendee Spotlight: Slow is Smooth. Smooth is Fast. Kurt Hoge, President of RenoType in Reno, NV, sent me this update, and it made my day: "When I first read Eli Goldratt's The Goal in January of this year, I knew immediately that we needed to bring the core teachings of the Theory of Constraints into our print shop. What I didn't k

Hello TOC Flow Community! November already? The saying is really true... life is like a roll of toilet paper, the closer you get to the end the faster it goes, but that's a story for another day! Here's what I've learned after years of watching companies do their yearly strategy planning: The organizations that actually achieve breakthroughs aren't the ones with the most ideas. They're the ones brave enough to ignore most of them. The Jeff Bezos Wake-Up Call Two weeks a