Working hard, but still can't keep up?This short, insightful book will teach you how to speed up at work, by slowing down, looking at your workplace slightly differently, then thinking a little.** Spoiler Alert **The world's best manufacturers have known the secret for decades: every workplace, big or small, has one resource that is slower than the rest. It's called The Bottleneck. Find it, speed it up, and your entire workplace speeds up. The problem is that, although this secret is well known inside manufacturing, it's been hidden from the rest of us, deep inside complicated manufacturing texts and sophisticated computer algorithms. Until now, that is. Clarke Ching, author of Rolling Rocks Downhill, has spent the last 20 years adapting and simplifying manufacturing's techniques so that everyone can use them, no matter where they work. In this book, he reveals a surprisingly simple process - called the FOCCCUS Formula - that you can use to find your bottleneck then manage it. The book takes roughly 90 minutes to read, and most readers figure out where their bottleneck is before they've finished.One reviewer wrote, "What a great and - dare I say it - inspirational read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm grateful for the stories and the lack of business mumbo-jumbo. Your readers will find it a useful kick-start for their minds because it shows them how to look at their problems in different ways."Read The Bottleneck Rules today, and you'll start running faster tomorrow.

Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try and improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant - or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a colleague from student days - Jonah - to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done. Described by Fortune as a 'guru to industry' and by Businessweek as a 'genius', Eliyahu M. Goldratt was an internationally recognized leader in the development of new business management concepts and systems. This 20th anniversary edition includes a series of detailed case study interviews by David Whitford, Editor at Large, Fortune Small Business, which explore how organizations around the world have been transformed by Eli Goldratt's ideas. The story of Alex's fight to save his plant contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC) developed by Eli Goldratt. Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal is the gripping novel which is transforming management thinking throughout the Western world. It is a book to recommend to your friends in industry - even to your bosses - but not to your competitors!

Outlines an approach to high-performance problem solving and decision making that draws on insights from survival guides, pop culture, and other sources.

Bottlenecker (n): a person who advocates for the creation or perpetuation of government regulation, particularly an occupational license, to restrict entry into his or her occupation, thereby accruing an economic advantage without providing a benefit to consumers. The Left, Right, and Center all hate them: powerful special interests that use government power for their own private benefit. In an era when the Left hates “fat cats” and the Right despises “crony capitalists,” now there is an artful and memorable one-word pejorative they can both get behind: bottleneckers. A “bottlenecker” is anyone who uses government power to limit competition and thereby reap monopoly profits and other benefits. Bottleneckers work with politicians to constrict competition, entrepreneurial innovation, and opportunity. They thereby limit consumer choice; drive up consumer prices; and they support politicians who willingly overstep the constitutional limits of their powers to create, maintain, and expand these anticompetitive bottlenecks. The Institute for Justice’s new book Bottleneckers coins a new word in the American lexicon, and provides a rich history and well-researched examples of bottleneckers in one occupation after another—from alcohol distributors to taxicab cartels—pointing the way to positive reforms.

--- It's May, so guess what? We all survived the Scottish winter! --- So ... here's 60% off the Kindle version (and 20% off the paperback) until the end of the week, in celebration.A story that sticks ...Rolling Rocks Downhill is a fast-moving business novel, like Eli Goldratt's classic, "The Goal", where you sit on the shoulders of the characters and quietly watch as they discover the few - but fundamental - principles which underly successful commercial software development. Faster than you ever thought possibleThis is NOT a technical book. It doesn't mention "Agile". It doesn't ram techniques and practices down your throat. There are other books for that. Rolling Rocks downhill is a book about delivering software projects ON TIME or, if you choose, EARLY. It's a book about building quality in and then running as FAST as you can. J. B. Rainsberger, author of JUnit Recipes:I don't know how many of my clients would take the time to read "The Goal", but I insist that they read Rolling Rocks Downhill--it strongly reinforces the essence of Agile software development that has been drowned in an ocean of process manuals, maturity models, and checklists. Just as "The Goal" sought to bring common sense back to manufacturing, so this book seeks to bring common sense back to a software industry that sorely needs it. -- J. B. Rainsberger Johanna Rothman, author of Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management:Maybe one of your teammates or someone in management has the bright idea that maybe transitioning to agile or lean will help. Maybe it does in some small way. But, it's not enough. You're on a death march, iteration by iteration. Or, with your board, you can see that you are making progress, but you're not working "fast enough." Or, you're not delivering what your customers need. You're still trying to "do it all." Why? Because it takes you forever to release anything. You know there's another piece to this. You just don't know what. You need to read Clarke Ching's Rolling Rocks Downhill.

Designed to fit in a guitar case, this 40-page, 5"x8" book includes over 70 of the most popular and useful tunings for acoustic & electric lap steel guitar, bottleneck slide guitar, resophonic guitar, Weissenborn. and Hindustani slide guitar as used by the greatest players of the past and present. Features tunings & string gauges for Rock, Blues, Country, Hawaiian, Western Swing, Folk, Celtic, Bluegrass, Jazz, Pop, Cajun, Ambient, Classical, Raga and every genre in between. Presented in an easy-to-read, graphic manner, the strings, notes, & musical intervals for each tuning are shown along with comments about the tuning; its uses, advantages and the players who've used it. A string gauge chart helps the player set-up each tuning with the proper gauge strings. For 6, 8, 10-string Guitars.

The essential healthcare guide to doing more with existing resources The Hospital and Clinic Improvement Handbook is a practical guide to how operations management -- in particular Lean and the Theory of Constraints (TOC) -- can rapidly advance value and performance in any healthcare organization. Utilizing a systems approach that will be relevant for healthcare managers and executives, it unpacks and demystifies concepts such as performance measures, operations, quality, cost accounting, pricing, and value enhancement, all as they relate to eliminating waste and non-value-adding activities.

When a person goes to the boss with a problem and the boss agrees to do something about it, the monkey is off his back and onto the boss's. How can managers avoid these leaping monkeys? Here is priceless advice from three famous experts: how managers can meet their own priorities, give back other people's monkeys, and let them solve their own problems.

Learn the psychological constrictions of attention, perception, memory, disposition, motivation, and social influence that determine whether customers will be receptive to your digital innovations. Bottlenecks: Aligning UX Design with User Psychology fills a need for entrepreneurs, designers, and marketing professionals in the application of foundational psychology to user-experience design. The first generation of books on the topic focused on web pages and cognitive psychology. This book covers apps, social media, in-car infotainment, and multiplayer video games, and it explores the crucial roles played by behaviorism, development, personality, and social psychology. Author David Evans is an experimental psychology Ph.D. and senior manager of consumer research at Microsoft who recounts high-stakes case studies in which behavioral theory aligned digital designs with the bottlenecks in human nature to the benefit of users and businesses alike. Innova tors in design and students of psychology will learn: The psychological processes determining users’ perception of, engagement with, and recommendation of digital innovations Examples of interfaces before and after simple psychological alignments that vastly enhanced their effectiveness Strategies for marketing and product development in an age of social media and behavioral targeting Hypotheses for research that both academics and enterprises can perform to better meet users’ needs Who This Book Is For Designers and entrepreneurs will use this book to give their innovations an edge on what are increasingly competitive platforms such as apps, bots, in-car apps, augmented reality content. Usability researchers and market researchers will leverage it to enhance their consulting and reporting. Students and lecturers in psychology departments will want it to help land employment in the private sector. Praise “Bottlenecks’ is a tight and eminently actionable read for business leaders in startups and enterprises alike. Evans gives us a rich sense of key psychological processes and even richer examples of them in action.” - Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products “Clients frequently ask our UX researchers and designers for deeper truths about why certain designs work and others fail. Bottlenecks offers practical explanations and evidence based on the idea that human cognition did not begin with the digital age.” - John Dirks, UX Director and Partner, Blink UX “Bottlenecks brings together two very important aspects of user experience design: understanding users and translating this into business impact. A must-read for anyone who wants to learn both.” - Josh Lamar, Sr. UX Lead, Microsoft Outlook

Written in a fast-paced thriller style, 'The Goal' contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas which underline the Theory of Constraints developed by the author.