THEORY OF CONSTRAINTS

1. The Five Steps of FocusingThe message of this book is not bottlenecks or cutting batches.It's not even how to arrange the activities of the factory floor. Asa matter of fact, the message is the same for any aspect of anycompany from product design and marketing to manufacturingand distribution. Everyone knows that the actions of marketingare guided by the concept of cost and margins, even more thanthe actions of production. And everyone knows that the bestsalesman in his/her company is the one who violates all therules—which immediately implies that the rules in marketingare as wrong as those in manufacturing.We grossly underestimate our intuition. Intuitively we doknow the real problems, we even know the solutions. What isunfortunately not emphasized enough, is the vast importanceof verbalizing our own intuition. As long as we will notverbalize our intuition, as long as we do not learn to cast itclearly into words, not only will we be unable to convinceothers, we will not even be able to convince ourselves of whatwe already know to be right. If we don't bother to verbalize ourintuition, we ourselves will do the opposite of what we believein. We will "just play a lot of games with numbers and words."If we don't bother toverbalize our intuition,we ourselves will dothe opposite of whatwe believe in.4