A Book that Changed my Career

2018 when I read this book, I had zero interest in management & operations. Two years back I left my job without any other plan just to explore my skills. What inspired me to leave my job was this article by Amit Somani a concept called Jobbatical- when you take a break from whatever you are doing for yourself, discover new skills, find out new aspects about yourself, rejuvenate and recharge.

Writing this article is a way of paying it forward.

This book got me interested in the field of management & operation

I never imagined myself to be doing managing or operations work, my past job included public speaking, building partnerships, organizing conferences/summits, building communities, I wanted to remain entrepreneurial & explore new ideas, maybe remain self-employed. I got this book as a gift by a person I have high regard for, I think in some ways this book changed me in ways that I am managing a team now & handling operations of a foreign company in India.

I read this book in 2 days

A book written in 1984 on a topic I had zero interest in, was finished by me in 2 days. What got me hooked was the storytelling which has drama, fiction, and a failing marriage along with a failing business and how by applying the theory of constraint the lead character manages to save the company & his marriage.

The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, & Jeff Cox

After reading this book, I got so interested in management & operations that I read books I considered boring before like Measure what matters: OKRs, Trillion dollar coach, Hard things about hard things, Art of Thinking Clearly, Thinking fast & thinking slow, Platform Scale and many more of this kind until an opportunity appeared in front of me to give me a chance to try what I learned. (Of course, I am able to connect the dots in the hindsight)

I am now an Executive Director at Progate, a Japanese education company, managing & growing the team along with handling the operations for scaling the growth. I am very lucky to have got an opportunity to try and learn more about my new found favorite field.

Book Summary - Its a management book written in a story format to keep you hooked. It's told in a way of a story where Alex, a plant manager is facing shut down of his plant as he is not able to deliver the orders which are delayed by 58 weeks. What's amazing is that the factory is running at full capacity and at full productivity yet nobody can figure out what's going wrong. Accounting books were telling a great story while the plant was headed for a shutdown, how was that even possible?

Alex with help from a mentor, soon figures out that the way they are measuring productivity & effectiveness was flawed. Key learnings are showcased in a fine step by step method of identifying & solving a problem with a process called Theory of Constraints.

Bottleneck & Constraint

If the output is a finished product, then inventory is the parts of the output, and operational expense is money needed to produce the output. Anything causing the output to go down is your bottleneck. The speed of the entire plant depends on the speed of the bottleneck. A constraint is something that imposes a limit or restriction that prevents your output from occurring. A constraint can be your company policy, culture, or even the fact that there are only so many hours in a day to accomplish things.

More productivity can cause the system to fail

If Y produces 100 parts in 1 hour and X produces 50 parts in 1 hour, then the speed of the system is 50 in an hour. Instead of making Y work for 1 hour you should focus on increasing the efficiency of X or make Y work for only 30 mins. More productivity can cause the system to fail as Y will pile up the parts in front of X, which will lead to excess inventory and affect your operational expense. Your cash gets locked into inventory which is waiting to become a finished product.

If the demand is 100 units a day, in the above image, B & E are the bottlenecks

In an office scenario what this means is there is no point in improving the efficiency & productivity of all the employees/team or processes, you need to find the weakest employee/team/process which is the bottleneck and focus on improving that link to improve the efficiency of the whole organization.

It's not about Goal setting but to identify what's the real Goal

The Goal

Another important thing is figuring out what is the real goal? In the book Alex soon understands that the real goal of the company is to make money. And to make money it needs to improve its output to produce finished products. To produce a finished product he needs to fix the entire process chain by identifying the weakest link(bottleneck) and improve its efficiency, remove the constraints, and manage the high productive resources effectively.

Job is not a destination but a learning journey, Leadership is not a position but a process

If you have a similar experience or a turning point in your career where you shifted your career completely or got the inspiration to try something else, please share them in the comments with me.