Another TOC book! It’s called Be Fast or Be Gone and it’s written by Critical Chain expert Andreas Scherer.
1. Hi Andrea, before we get to the book, what's your background?
For the last 15 years I have held VP level positions with public or private technology companies here in the US and internationally. I have a broad functional background in sales, marketing, business development, and consulting as well as software development. My educational background is Computer Science. I taught Neural Networks and Database Systems at the university level in Germany.
2. Without giving away too many secrets, can you describe the books setup and plot?
Well, here is a brief overview of the book. The protagonist is Mike Knight, an executive in a semiconductor firm. He learns that his eight-year-old son Tim has a rare form of brain cancer. Tim's best hope for long-term survival is a drug called Supragrel. Unfortunately, Supragrel is still in early clinical trials and may reach the market too late. Mike makes the agonizing decision to quit his job and go to work for Altus Labs, the developer of Supragrel, in hopes of helping them bring the drug to market more quickly. Mike is in for the challenge of his life as he struggles to keep his family together while racing against time to implement Critical Chain in Altus Labs. Supragrel is just the beginning of a much larger Critical Chain implementation across the entire company.
3. So, you've written a book about Critical Chain. There are already a few good CC books available. Why did we need another one? What's different about your book?
Well, I would like to answer this question on two levels: professionally and personally.
You are right. There are a number of great books out there on Critical Chain. And I hope there will be many more. Each of these books cover a different angle. Here is the one that I was after. In business we want transparency of project status, reliable project delivery, and faster projects. We Critical Chain practitioners spend a lot of time explaining how this can be accomplished. I talk to a lot of people personally in the business world; I write a blog "The Point" (www.andreasscherer.com); I give speeches at conferences and more. But at the end of the day it is tough for people to understand what an enterprise-wide roll-out of Critical chain looks like. How do you make thousand, two thousand, perhaps ten thousand people think and act in a way that is consistent with the methodology? What are the issues that come up? How do you make an implementation sticky?
Very often I had executives coming to me a year into a roll-out telling me that NOW they understood what I was taking about when we started our relationship. With Be Fast Or Be Gone I wanted to tell the story of an enterprise-wide roll-out of Critical Chain with all the dynamics that occur along the way. I wanted to write a book that helped executives and their teams develop an intuition of what to expect. I also wanted it to be a short read. It's designed so that you can read it on a flight from Washington DC to San Francisco. I proofread the final version of the book on that particular flight to be sure that it was possible.
On a personal note, I had a writing project like this on my bucket list. In my time as a computer scientist, I had published a lot--mainly articles but also books. It was a goal of mine to publish a book in English. Now that I have done this, I must say it was a lot of fun. I might do it again.
4. Your company sells CC software but your book is software agnostic. Is that true?
Yes. This is true. You find in the Appendix a reference to ProChain, but otherwise I kept the book software agnostic. I found that if I spent too much time talking about specific features and functions of the software it got in the way of the story and took away from the power of Critical Chain concepts.
5. What was it like writing a business novel? I know from experience that it's a really hard genre to write. Can you tell us why you chose that genre rather than non-fiction? What was the hardest part?
Writing a book is in many ways like writing software. But since I wanted to tell a story because I thought it would keep people interested, I chose to write a novel rather than a technical piece. I started with an idea and a general outline. The first version of the book was written within six months. In that time frame I had a close circle of people giving me feedback. After the first draft was done it took about another four to five months of continuous iterations driven by feedback from people in the industry. The most difficult part was making the little things in the book sound right. I wanted the book to be as authentic as possible. So, I am very grateful that so many of my colleagues in the life science industry took the time to educate me about their world.
6. What's Rob really like?
Ha, that is probably worth another book. People know him as a superb software genius who had the foresight to start a company around Critical Chain. They know him as an excellent writer and book author. But let me tell you something that most people don't know about Rob Newbold. There is a little bit of a wild side too. Whenever his busy schedule permits he rides his motor cycle on the windy roads in Connecticut.
7. What's your favourite TOC story - be it personal, professional?
Well, I put my favourite TOC story into the book. In one of our implementations we were able to clearly demonstrate that one business unit was the bottleneck driving the timeline of the R&D projects of the entire company. While this was suspected by some, it was a revelation to the senior executives after they saw our analysis along with precise numbers. Without giving everything away, you find my favourite TOC story is in Chapter 14 of Be Fast Or Be Gone.
Andreas Scherer, PhD
EVP and GM
ProChain Solutions, Inc.
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