usiness

商业版块

Bartleby

巴托比专栏

The bottleneck bane

瓶颈烦恼

“The goal” is a notable business book for two reasons.

《目标》是一本著名的商业书籍，原因有两个。

The first is its unusual genre.

首先是它不同寻常的文体。

First published in 1984, it is a management tome dressed up in the clothes of a thriller.

该书于1984年首次出版，是一本披着悬疑小说外衣的管理学巨著。

The book, written by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox, tells the story of Alex Rogo, a plant manager who has to overhaul his factory within three months or face closure.

这本书由艾利·高德拉特和杰夫·科克斯所著，讲述了亚历克斯·罗戈的故事，罗戈是一名工厂经理，必须在三个月内对工厂进行彻底改革，否则工厂将倒闭。

To the objection that this is not thrilling at all, consider that it could have been a lot worse (“Alan Key must format a slide deck by midnight or he won’t get enough sleep to function properly the next day”).

有人反对说，这故事一点都不刺激，但请想一想，情况可以变得更糟(“艾伦·基必须在午夜前做完一套PPT，否则他第二天就会因为睡眠不足而没法正常工作”)。

And Rogo’s efforts to reduce excess inventory and win over Bill Peach, his hard-driving boss, are weirdly entertaining.

此外，罗戈为了减少过剩库存和赢得严厉的老板比尔·皮奇的支持所做的努力，也有一种奇怪的趣味性。

In any case readers lapped it up.

无论哪种原因，读者非常买账。

“The Goal” sold millions .It has been reprinted several times.

《目标》卖出了几百万册，重印了好几次。

It even got turned into a graphic novel.

甚至还被改编成了一本图画小说。

Its second contribution was to popularise thinking about bottlenecks.

这本书的第二个贡献是普及了对瓶颈的思考。

The novel was written to get across Goldratt’s “theory of constraints”, a method for identifying those resources whose capacity does not match the demands placed on them.

高德拉特写这部小说是为了阐释他的“制约理论”，这是一种用来识别那些能力无法满足需求的资源的方法。

(This definition comes from one of the book’s protagonists—Jonah, a brilliant, globe-trotting business adviser whose resemblance to a real person seems unlikely to be coincidental.)

(这个定义来自书中的一个主人公钟纳，他是一位才华横溢、周游世界的商业顾问，他与一个真实人物的相似之处似乎不太可能是巧合。)

Bottlenecks are often thought of as physical constraints.

瓶颈通常被认为是物理上的限制。

In Rogo’s factory, for example, the bottlenecks are two particular machines whose through-put must be increased in order to ship orders faster.

例如，在罗戈的工厂里，瓶颈是两台特定的机器，它们的产量必须提高，才能更快地发货。

In recent years the pandemic has increased awareness of such bottlenecks in the wider supply chain, whether because of the impact of semiconductor shortages or the effect of backlogs at congested ports.

近年来，疫情提高了人们对更大范围的供应链中此类瓶颈的认识，无论是半导体短缺的影响，还是港口拥堵积压的影响。

Policies can be bottlenecks, too.

政策也可能成为瓶颈。

The pandemic also forced vaccine manufacturers to ditch normal patterns of working.

疫情迫使疫苗制造商放弃正常的工作模式。

In “Vaxxers”, a book about their work to develop the Oxford-AstraZeneca covid-19 jab, Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green describe how they did more “at risk” work, doing things in parallel that would usually have been done sequentially.

《做疫苗的人》讲述了疫苗制造商如何研发出牛津-阿斯利康新冠肺炎疫苗，在这本书中，萨拉·吉尔伯特和凯瑟琳·格林讲述了制造商如何做了更多有风险的工作，把通常情况下需要依次完成的事情改成同时进行。

That would have meant wasted work if they had hit a problem, but also that scientists got stuff done much faster than usual.

这意味着如果他们遇到了问题，那么工作就白做了，但也意味着科学家们完成工作的速度比平时快了许多。

Bill Peach would have approved.

比尔·皮奇肯定会同意这种做法的。

People are also bottlenecks.

人也是一种瓶颈。

Within organisations, managers themselves are frequently the points at which things get bunged up.

在组织内部，经理本身往往是出问题的地方。

That might be because executives simply have too much to do.

可能是因为高管们有太多的事情要做。

Estimates vary on how many direct reports a manager should ideally have.

一名经理应该有多少直接下属才是比较理想的，对于这个问题的估计各不相同。

But if they don’t all fit in a lift, you almost certainly have too many.

但是，如果一个电梯里装不下所有这些人，那么几乎可以肯定人数太多了。

It might be their own fault—if they are micromanagers, say, offering up helpful opinions on everything from font sizes to office furniture.

也可能是经理自己的错，比方说，如果他们是微观管理者，从字体大小到办公室家具，事无巨细地提供有用的意见。

It might be because no one is comfortable making a decision for fear of being hauled over the coals later by their own boss.

还可能是因为没有人敢于做出决定，因为他们担心之后会被自己的上司指责。

It might be because there is jockeying and confusion over who has the right to make a call (an “upward status disagreement”, if you like jargon; a “pissing contest”, if you don’t).

也可能是因为在谁有权力拍板的问题上存在争执和混乱(这用行业黑话来说就是“向上地位分歧”，说人话就是“抢着当老大”)。

Bottlenecks can stem from good behaviour as well as bad.

瓶颈可能源于糟糕的行为，也可能源于良好的行为。

Collaboration is normally celebrated, but it can easily result in more delays if people’s time is being soaked up on non-essential tasks.

协同合作通常是受到提倡的，但如果人们的时间被非必要的任务占用，那么合作就很容易导致更多的拖延。

Similarly, the person who responds to every message quickly and clears their inbox every night looks like the very opposite of a bottleneck, but that depends on two things: on what work they are not doing while they manically check their email, and on whether those messages are about trivial things.

同样，及时回复每一封邮件并每晚清空收件箱的人看起来是瓶颈的反面，但这取决于两件事：一是他们疯狂查看电子邮件时落下了什么工作没做，二是这些邮件是否都是些鸡毛蒜皮的小事。

If people are responding at great speed on matters of zero importance—especially if they are high up the ladder and colleagues are therefore likely to respond to them in turn—they are probably creating trouble of some sort.

如果人们对不重要的事情回应很快--特别是如果他们的职位较高，同事就很可能会再回复他们--那么这些人很可能正在制造某种麻烦。

Whatever the causes of congestion, the costs can be material.

无论造成拥堵的原因是什么，成本都可能是巨大的。

Daniel Ek, the boss of Spotify, attributed a recent restructuring at the music-streaming company to the need to make faster decisions.

Spotify的老板丹尼尔·埃克最近将这家音乐流媒体公司进行了重组，声称原因是需要更快地做出决定。

Consultants at McKinsey have estimated that about 530,000 days of managers’ time each year may be wasted on broken decision-making processes at a typical Fortune 500 company.

麦肯锡的顾问估计，在一家《财富》500强企业中，经理们每年大约有53万天被浪费在被中断的决策过程上。

“The Goal” is not the greatest thriller ever. No one dies.

《目标》并不是最棒的悬疑小说。书中没有人死去。

The only real violence done is to the English language (“It’s not until I’m busy with my delicious veal parmesan that my thoughts start to crystallise”).

唯一真正的暴力是对英语语言的暴力(“直到我忙着吃美味的帕尔马干酪小牛肉，我的想法才开始明朗起来”)。

But it is a lot more readable than most business books, and it makes you think about a subject that is relevant not only to supply-chain managers and operations managers but to bosses everywhere.

但它比大多数商业书籍的可读性要强得多，而且它让你思考的主题不仅与供应链经理和运营经理相关，也与所有地方的老板相关。

Bottlenecks abound. They just need to be found.

瓶颈比比皆是，只需找到它们。

来源：经济学人