About

I think I’m a combination of basically logical person, with a good gift for Math, and an artist (not a painter more like an author) who delivers unique experiences to other people.  I studied film-making and I was active TV director for nine years, before switching to computers. Listening to music is an ongoing passion for me.  I still try to merge the two sides of my personality for greater effect.  If you read my “Management Dilemmas” you might spot this duality.

I’m fortunate to have worked closely with the late Dr. Eli Goldratt, the developer of the Theory of Constraints (TOC). I definitely see myself as his pupil.

I joined Dr. Eli Goldratt as a programmer in 1985. My first job was to develop “a computer game for adults that would teach them to think!” That game was The Opt Game. I continued to develop simulators widely used as educational tools for managers to demonstrate key logical insights for managing semi-complex systems. The MICSS (Management Interactive Case Study Simulator) simulator served me as a laboratory for learning the real cause-and-effect in the manufacturing shop-floor.  As I insisted to fully understand the causal connections between a decision I made during the simulation and the actual results I had to challenged several conceptual paradigms I had before.  This kind of learning is very difficult to do in real life as it is impossible to go back in time and simply try a different decision. While a simulation is NEVER a true reflection of reality, when you are aware of the differences it could truly test your paradigms and upgrade your understanding.

Developing a platform for upgrading my own ability to predict the outcomes of an action,  had, for me, the feeling of creating something new, similar to work of art.

The impact of MICSS, the platform for experiencing the cause-and-effect in the shop-floor, led me to develop the concept of Simplified-DBR and the first basic insights for make-to-stock in the TOC way. Both developments were formally adopted by Dr. Goldratt, which felt like huge achievement.  After all Dr. Goldratt came up with the revolutionary concept of Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR). Convincing him to update and simplify the original concept was far from being obvious.

You can find descriptions of my books in another page in this site.

My goal is to spread the unique knowledge of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) and be instrumental in developing further the knowledge on how to manage organizations.

I dedicate a lot of time supporting TOC implementations worldwide through the use of Internet advising consultants and practitioners how to deal with the specific problems.

I’m now engaged in developing solutions for three key problems in management:

1. Supporting the key decisions concerning “What to sell? What price is right? What capacity levels should be maintained?” These decisions have to be based on mutual efforts of Marketing, Sales, Operations, Finance and possibly R&D and involve the intuition of the key people, translating their intuition into numbers, considering also the uncertainty and analyzing the full ramifications of those key decisions.
2. Learning from ONE event – a method to learn from experience in order to fix flawed paradigms that are shared by many in the organization. This method, using team efforts, is able to identify threats and potential future damage earlu enough so most damage can be prevented.
3. The insights and tools for handling uncertainty in a way that vastly improves the performance of the organization as a whole. I claim that ignoring uncertainty is, by far, the biggest core problem of every organization. The simpler type of uncertainty, which I call “common and expected uncertainty”, is easy to ignore, but it messes the economics of every organization very significantly.