It’s funny to see how history seems to be endlessly repeating, how issues that have been fixed years ago are coming back to the surface.

Because the question of productivity, time management, ROI in an enterprise 2.0 or in a Service Oriented Organization remembers me of something that already took place years ago (and was fixed) in manufacturing industry and seems to be breaking out again in the knowledge and services industry.

It’s nothing more than a nth application of theory of constraints (TOC).

I first looked into this case when I was a student and was very interested in optimization issues (finally I didn’t change that much since I’m mainly blogging about optimizing organization in a knowledge economy context). At the end of a manufacturing management class, the outside contributer advised me to read “the goal”, from Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

First surprise, it was a novel. The proof of the power of storytelling because I’m not sure I would have been caught up in this if it had been writen in a more academic manner.

Second surprise : I was really slapped in the face to realize I had to unlearn many thing I thought being unbreakable truth. The young and inexperienced student I was at this time was convinced that everything was about productivity and outputs there was no sheet anchor. I learned, on the contrary, that it was sometimes efficient to have employees that don’t work and machines that don’t produce anything. It was not that idiot : if the final product needs many pieces to be assembled, it’s no use having a huge sock of “A” if “B” needs more time to be produced. Doing this drives stocks that cost lots of money, so it’s sometimes better to slow production down, even interupt it. And the employee that is, as a consequence, not working, helps you to make money because he’s not making you loose money by creating stocks.

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