Favorite Goldratt Quote
I’ve been reading more Eli Goldratt and I loved this quote:
But it was an unfair fight; I had the logic and they were less than two hundred.
That’s from Production the TOC Way. It’s wonderful how he thought logic gave him the advantage, alone, against well over 100 people. (He won.)
12 Rules for Life Video
I made a fourth video completing my discussion of rule 1 from Jordan Peterson’s new book 12 Rules for Life.
Podcast About Intelligence
I talked for an hour about how intelligence works.
Goldratt and Japan
I found out something really bad and disappointing about Eli Goldratt. He delayed translation of his books into Japanese for fear they’d be really successful, increase the trade imbalance, and generally help Japan get way ahead of the West. He delayed translation from around 1987 to 2000, by which point he thought Japan was stagnating and the West had caught up.
In what ways was Japan ahead? For big examples, think about how Toyota was beating Ford, and Japanese companies like Sony excelled in electronics. Not everyone is aware, but Japan today is considered the world’s third largest economy, after just the U.S. and China. Japan was second until China’s recent growth, and (unsourced on Wikipedia) represented 17.8% of the entire world economy at its peak in 1994.
The supposed harm of trade imbalances is junk economics. Apparently Goldratt never gave the matter much thought. That’s disappointing because he’s an advocate of win/win solutions and says there are no conflicts in reality. When you seem to see a conflict – e.g. Japanese people would benefit from your book but you think there’d be a negative result – then there’s a mistaken premise somewhere. It’s a mistake – in Goldratt’s own view – to accept lose/lose solutions or compromises. But that’s what he did!
Goldratt’s goal was to teach the world to think. He betrayed his goal by withholding educational material from people specifically because he thought they would learn a lot from him. He intentionally blocked progress because he wanted the West to maintain a position at the top.
He could have been wrong. Maybe his books wouldn’t have made much difference in Japan. But his intentions were gross. And I think his books could have changed the world if released promptly in Japan. When finally released, they sold very well in Japan, got lots of publicity, and promptly resulted in adoption by major companies (like Toyota) and parts of the Japanese government.
What if they were released earlier? They could have made a much bigger difference. They could have prevented the stagnation of Japan which Goldratt saw later. They could have given Japan a bigger competitive edge – exactly what Goldratt feared – and thus spread to the whole world. The West learned a lot from Japan while trying to catch up (e.g. Just In Time and Lean). Goldratt’s ideas could have been part of that, and that way they’d have much better adoption worldwide today, making the whole world much better off.
Goldratt didn’t just delay Japan’s progress, he missed out on a timing window when Japan – the country where he could most successfully get adoption for his ideas – was acting as somewhat of a model for the rest of the world. And today software is super important, which lessens the relative importance of manufacturing, which is the area where Goldratt’s ideas could most easily have a big impact.
The general consequences of a world with less wealth (due to lack of adoption of Goldratt’s great business management ideas) include people dying due to less medical research and dying in many other ways. Wealth helps prevent deaths from heatwaves, cold, drought, tsunamis, hunger, inadequately funded police and much more. The specific, direct consequences of Japanese car companies being less successful include more Westerners dying in car accidents because they drive Japanese cars that aren’t as good as they could be.
patio11 argued that Japan is part of Western society (I saw this later the same day I wrote this mini essay). I agree. Goldratt shouldn’t have seen Japan as the other. Yes, there are some substantial differences between Japan and the English speaking countries that don’t set us apart from France. But Japan Westernized and assimilated enough after World War II that I say to accept them, and I see the success of companies like Toyota and Sony as demonstrating the merit of Japan (rather than being exceptions). Goldratt himself was from Israel, another country I’m happy to credit as being Western, despite it having some differences from America. Anyway, Japan is certainly no threat. Japanese success should be celebrated without hesitation.
Click here for sources and additional details. I even got some Japanese sources translated into English.
My Blog
You’re a Complex Software Project; Introspection is Auditing. I’m particularly happy with this idea. I think it’s a good way to explain it, and a good, simple mental model people can use. It also relates to a discussion with a blog commenter who doesn’t understand hostility or introspection (just like everyone else – don’t silently, passively pretend you’d do much better).
Expanding Our Limits (Goldratt quote)
A Discussion Of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, And Progress (it’s bad)
It occurred to me that preventing “money laundering” is a euphemism which means preventing monetary privacy.
More thoughts on Gobble meal kit delivery. I like it. I posted this because I realized it costs less cash, comparatively, than I thought by looking at how much food I got and the price. Instead of saving cash, a significant part of the difference is I’m left with less leftover ingredients (which would not have full cash value to me).
12 Rules for Life Typos in Rule 1 (Jordan Peterson emailed me back to thank me for this)
Links
Article: The high cost of “safe” estimates, by Josh Jordan, explains a main point from Eli Goldratt’s book The Critical Chain (great book). The book’s followup point is that the safety buffers for uncertainty should be aggregated at the entire project level, rather than be padding on each individual step. This insight, ignored by many large companies, can get big projects done in half the time or less!
Article: German Activist Has Her Eyes Opened About Muslim Refugees
Ann Coulter: Amazing New Breakthrough To Reduce Mass Shootings!. The solution is to build a wall and change immigration policies.
Ann Coulter archives: Negroes With Guns. Read the article (and Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama) if this quote interests you:
Gun control laws were originally promulgated by Democrats to keep guns out of the hands of blacks. This allowed the Democratic policy of slavery to proceed with fewer bumps and, after the Civil War, allowed the Democratic Ku Klux Klan to menace and murder black Americans with little resistance.
… gun control is always a scheme of the powerful to deprive the powerless of the right to self-defense
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