Customer Reviews

Securing the Future: Strategies for Exponential Growth Using the Theory of Constraints (The CRC Press Series on Constraints Management)

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I am a Jonah's Jonah focused on eliminating market (external) constraints in a variety of industries. I found this book while taking the External Constraint Course at the Goldratt Institute. While the Eli Goldratt book "Its Not Luck" was inspirational and the Institute class was excellent, "Securing the Future" is what I refer to day by day.

It is rare to find a book with so much valuable information and so well written, that also loses my attention as abruptly as Securing the Future.

Gerald Kendal does an excellent job of explaining T.O.C. and comparing other improvement initiatives, as well as providing very useful examples of the various trees and diagrams used during the process of analyzing an organization. The clarity of the examples is among the best I have seen. Unfortunately, about a third of the way through the book, examples he provided of methods to solve certain customer service issues seemed so absurd to me, it was very difficult to take any of the remaining material with any seriousness.

My first negative reaction came when the author suggested that companies hire a full time person to turn customer dissatisfaction into profit, paying that person 25% of any increased profits. While this sounds like a grand idea on the surface, measuring such improvements for the purpose of compensation could lead to multiple problems and conflicts.

I still kept an open mind however, until his suggestion that all telephone answering systems with prompts have an option to press one for complaints about the phone system, and that the phone then ring directly to the office of the CEO. Later, when he suggested making it policy to give away any item for free to a customer if it was not marked correctly, the book lost all credibility for me.

I will keep the book on my shelf, as it does have excellent examples for constructing various logic trees, but personally, that is the only value it will have for me.

This book provides practical tools to increase profits for your organization. Gerald Kendall shares the criterion to prioritize/choose themes for improving customer satisfaction. He suggests that one should focus on those issues for improvement so that the customer is either willing to pay a higher price or ready to give you additional volume, or this would prevent the customer from switching over to a competitor. Improving those customer dissatisfactions, that would not result in one of the above, would not benefit your organization at all. I find many such tips through out this book.