TOC Thinkers

William Hoefle - Q1

William Hoefle, of The Goal Insitute, has an interesting TOC story (or 10) to tell.  Let's get straight to it.

Q1: Hi William, Can you tell us a little about yourself, both professionally and personally?  What bought you to TOC?  What kept you with it?  That sort of thing.

Hi Clarke,

I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of your TOCThinkers site.

First of all, from a personal perspective, I live in Greensboro, NC with my wife, Amy, my son Myles (ten) and my daughter Sloane (eight). I serve on the Board of Directors of the Greensboro Opera Company as well as the Advisory Board of a number of companies locally and abroad.  I have a BS in Finance and an MBA (with honors) from Indiana University, and have served on the Associate Faculty in the Department of Business and Economics for Indiana University.  When I am not working I am an avid golf and tennis player.

I joined the Avraham Y. Goldratt Institute (AGI) in 1993 working for Dr. Donn Novotny (the person upon whom the character "Alex Rogo" was based in the book The Goal), one of the founding partners of AGI. Most of my implementation and teaching work there was centered on CCPM (both education and implementation) and I was the AGI lead on our comprehensive, multi-site, multi-project implementations of CCPM for companies like Seagate, Lucent, Medtronic, Herman Miller, and several other smaller (and less well known) organizations.

In 2002 Dr. Novotny and I left AGI to form The Goal Institute, Inc. (www.thegoalinstitute), which is focused on applied research, implementation and executive education in the field of TOC.
I'm a Jonah's Jonah and a Certified TOC Expert in all TOCICO categories.  I'm also one of the original members of the TOCICO, having been in attendance at the Atlanta, GA meeting with Eli Goldratt where it was formed.  I am also a member of the Turnaround Management Association, APICS, and the National Speakers Association.

I've been fortunate enough to have been sent to Latin America, Singapore, London, Paris and Italy to give talks or lead implementation work on CCPM (among other TOC topics).  My most highly requested speaking topic centers on my paper "Project Management: From Art to Science with the Theory of Constraints".

I'm the Managing Director of Alex Rogo Ventures, a turn-around management / venture capital firm whose charter is to "Create Value through Revitalization" - utilizing TOC (among other best practices).
Having a "traditional" business degree (under and grad) has compelled me to stay with TOC.  In some cases, I was learning TOC approaches side by side with conventional approaches.  This didn't always garner me favor with my graduate school professors, although it did make for excellent class room discussions!  I did my Masters Thesis on "Why Standard Cost Accounting should no longer be used in Manufacturing". I received good marks along with odd looks (given we were the 8th highest ranked graduate business program in the country at the time, imagine my disappointment with how far behind the university truly was).  A traditional business degree (particularly the MBA) did, however, assist in my ability to "build the bridge" between conventional thinking and a TOC approach.

My personal objective is to secure the future of US industry - and I center many of my talks, seminars and consulting emphasis on small, regional manufacturers (I focus a lot on the Carolina area) to show them how they can compete globally - primarily re-working their manufacturing, sales and accounting systems.

Willian Hoefle - Q2

Q2.  I first came across Critical Chain when Eli published his book in 1997.  It was a great coincidence for me: I'd read The Goal a couple of years earlier but - working in software development - I struggled to see how I could use TOC; Critical Chain seemed useful in my world and it kicked off my obsession with TOC.  I take it that you were involved with Critical Chain before Goldratt's book hit the shelves.  Tell me ... what was it like in the early days?

To be perfectly frank, prior to the publishing of Eli's book Critical Chain, CCPM was a very small part of what we did at the Institute - at least in the business unit I was in and I'm pretty sure across the other units as well.  At that time the TOC offerings were typically viewed less as a holistic approach, as Eli and others now (rightfully) advocate via Viable Vision and other approaches, but a collection of various solutions.  On the one side we had strategic solutions with the Thinking Processes and the Jonah Program.  On the other side were what we called the "derivative applications" - tactical solutions that had originally been derived by the use of the TP.

Those derivative solutions were Production, Distribution, Sales & Marketing, Throughput Accounting, Setting the Direction of a Company, Management Skills and Project and Engineering Management.  At that time "project and engineering management" was essentially Critical Chain and "Flush" (flush being a simple model for determining project pay back).  As far as I know, as the CCPM solution was developed (and the book written) "flush" disappeared and the full CCPM with buffer management, etc. evolved.  Critical Chain at that time was, I believe, primarily a scheduling approach - very little had been done relative to execution and buffer management, and no consideration at all to the multi-project approach (in fact, even the book Critical Chain is mostly silent to the dynamics of the multi-project environment - focusing on single projects).  It was almost a twist on the DBR scheduling - that little formal development had been done at the time.

I don't know if it was serendipity or if Eli just knew it was the right time, but the timing of the book Critical Chain was perfect from a market standpoint - after the publication our business mix changed from probably < 5% Critical Chain type work to well over half.  Companies felt that, to a large degree, they had achieved a level of order in their supply chains.  At that point what I call "Development Chain" became the hot topic - the combination (and continuum) of portfolio management, pipeline management and project management.  At that point the Lucents, Seagates, Herman Millers, et al of the world starting really investing in their NPD environments re: real solutions.  At about that same time some very powerful software solutions were developed specifically to support CCPM, and that really helped to institutionalize the solutions in distributed organizations (fortunately or unfortunately, CCPM multi-project management is nearly impossible to effectively execute without software).