Focus and Leverage Part 61

Here is the second half of our Preface which outlines some of what is to follow in our book, Epiphanized.  As always, Bruce and I welcome your comments.

Preface Part 2 for Epiphanized©

A book by Bob Sproull and Bruce Nelson

This book is the story of Joe Pecci, a newly hired manager of the Office of Continuous Improvement (CI) for Barton Enterprises, a multimillion dollar company that produces fuel tanks for the aviation and defense industries.  When Joe walks into this new organization he finds the situation to be in chaos with some significant issues that need attention.  There are serious problems with on-time delivery performance and no clearly defined path to improve it.  Joe befriends Sam Henderson, Barton’s VP of Operations, and together they discover and forge the future path to prosperity.  They accomplish this effort with the help of a very talented bartender named Connor Jackson.  This is the narrative of a very rapid and successful organizational transformation.  It portrays an innovative approach to rapid and sustained growth and profitability using some uncommon, and yet exceptional, improvement tools and methods.  It‘s a success story with a triumphant ending.

The primary theme throughout this book has been to unify and enhance improvement tools and methods.  This is a sort of grand unification that combines improvement methods and tools to create a new level of usefulness.  Emerging situations and problems can quickly expose the need to gain access to new and different problem-solving tools.    This same spirit of unification has also been manifested within the methodologies themselves.  Sometimes tools within methods have been combined to create new tools for solving problems.  Systems and people are just not as linear as we would like them to be, and neither is life.  Things happen and things change, sometimes at an exponential rate. 

We believe that in writing this book we have laid out a pioneering pathway for significant gains in profitability and market share for any company employing the methodology presented here.  We are both convinced that the integration of the Theory of Constraints with Lean and Six Sigma, known as TLS, is the wave of the future.  We also believe that explaining it through the eyes of Joe Pecci, in a business novel format, will add relevance to its usefulness and power.  The concepts, tools and principles presented in this book may be counter intuitive to many, but if the principles are followed, the results are sure to come.  If your company has been struggling with a Lean or Six Sigma implementation and you’re not happy with the bottom line improvement you’re getting, the integrated TLS methodology can give you the improvement you are seeking.

As you read this story, please pay particular attention to the subtleties that are presented within the body of the book.  You’ll see that taking the time to recognize and truly engage the subject matter experts within your company in your improvement efforts will lead you to new levels of profitability—if you’ll just let them actively participate in your company’s success.  This is a lesson that is confirmed several times during the development of this story.  We believe that your company is poised for greatness, and if you will use the lessons presented in our book, it will happen.

In our next posting, we will start Chapter 1 and introduce you to three of the main characters in this book.  So sit back and enjoy it and please send us some comments on what you think about the book.

Bob and Bruce