iNTERFACEWARE

Only Solve the Largest Bottleneck

This is a major idea from the Theory of Constraints. It’s profound, and it really helps you think more clearly about business, software, and indeed any system, even your home.

If you are fuzzy in your thinking, you can waste a lot of time not optimizing the main bottleneck.

This leads to wasted effort and thrashing. It’s better to be calm and realistic about what the biggest bottleneck is.

I did a lot of this type of critical thinking as I deconstructed my Canadian operation.

It was difficult to see the real bottlenecks in the business until all the staff were gone. That said, they really left a lot of awkward systems for me to deal with.

AWS was bad. Microsoft Azure was an absolute nightmare to shut down—it was only open because Richard Wang, my services manager, wanted to pad his resume and go to Microsoft Azure conferences.

Banking was horrific to navigate, with all the layers of dysfunction.

I lost a lot of valuable time trying to persuade my staff to move to a new affiliate structure. But honestly, I had built a system unwittingly that was less of a talent acquisition system and more of an overhead-maximization system. Most of my staff were absolutely incompetent in their negotiations. And, I paid way too much in severance—if I knew then what I know now, I would have paid less.

There was no meaningful way to scale that system—not without the boundary violations that let `customers’ (by that, I mean employees in the organizations we served) have far too much power to dictate things completely above their pay grade.

Gradually, though, I did get the major systems under control. Some of the big wins were retiring Google Mail—wow, did their system degenerate into a terrible pile of entropy. Once I switched over to another mail provider, I saw that:

So it made sense, overall, to jury rig a new, fairly open licensing system and suspend billing processes until I had time to work with affiliates to make a simple process to fully automate that. It reminds me of what the Koch Brothers did when they shut down their fast-food restaurant, took the time to think things through, and came up with the system for McDonald’s.

The Theory of Constraints is amazing. I always found it very frustrating, and honestly disrespectful, when I would talk with enthusiasm about this theory to staff and customers and at best get lip service—at worst, bored looks.

Well, I finally gave myself the opportunity to apply the theory to the extreme, and after the initial rocky period, I can really see it come together.

It is hugely important to be able to see the whole system. Otherwise, you miss really important details that my employees were often too unskilled or unmotivated to notice.