My New Book Part 1

This series of posts is all about my new book scheduled for publication on December 21st.  The title of the book is The Secret to Maximizing Profitability - A Business Novel on How to Successfully Combine the Theory of Constraints, Lean, and Six Sigma to Drive Profit Margins to New Levels.  The underlying reason I decided to write this book was because of all the emails I have received asking me to please write another book, but this time please use a business novel format.  Apparently, Bruce Nelson and my books, Epiphanized and its sequel, Focus and Leverage were very popular with our audience. And while this book is not a sequel to Focus and Leverage, it is written in the same style as both of its predecessors. So, I’m hoping that The Secret to Maximizing Profitability is an enjoyable read for everyone reading it.

This book lays out, as the title suggests, the real secret to maximizing your company’s profitability. While many companies have implemented improvement initiatives like Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing, there is a missing link which when discovered and implemented, will take these same companies to profit levels not seen before. This missing link is the Theory of Constraints (TOC) and when it’s combined with Lean and Six Sigma, amazing things will be sure to follow.

In this book I walk you through the step-by-step method on how to combine these three methodologies with the result being significant improvements to flow, major improvements in variation, substantial reductions in waste, superior on-time delivery, and ultimately, maximized profitability. I have been using this integrated methodology for years, and each time the results realized were well beyond what the leadership teams had experienced before.

In Chapter 1, I lay the foundation for a company struggling to be profitable enough to satisfy their Board of Directors. Their story begins with a man named Mark Roder, who has just left a meeting with the Board of Directors of a portfolio of companies, including his own company, Tires for All. Mark is the General Manager of Tires for All, a company that manufactures tires and rubber articles for the automotive and trucking industry. Mark’s meeting with the Board did not go well as his reported profit margins were not high enough to satisfy the Board of Directors. Because of his low profit margins, Mark is given an ultimatum by the Board to either improve his profitability, or else! And the “or else” is the potential for Mark to lose his job.

In Chapter 2, I lay out the basics of Six Sigma in very simple terms. Mark has been reading about this improvement methodology and decides that he wants to try this method at Tires for All, to “right the ship” before drastic action is taken by the Board of Directors. Weeks of training take place at Tires for All to a plethora of employees on Six Sigma, and they even hire a Six Sigma Master Black Belt to help with their improvement effort. Although improvements to their profit margins are the result of Six Sigma, the level of profitability is not enough to satisfy the Board of Directors. Although the Board recognizes that improvements have been made at Tires for All, Mark is given another ultimatum by the Board, so he begins looking elsewhere for another potential improvement methodology. What he finds is Lean Manufacturing.

In my next post, I will continue on with Chapter 3.
Bob Sproull