Finding the bottleneck

Part of the core MBA curriculum is operations management, a course that teaches you to be relentless about the efficiency of supply chains and inventory management. The only thing I really remember was how to approach supply chains: find the bottleneck, fix it, then look for the next bottleneck to fix.

It’s much more useful advice than my fellow students and I would have realized, sitting in a sterilized environment where businesses are run on spreadsheets and profits always seem to go up. You’d be forgiven for thinking that if you’re smart enough, you could design a system without bottlnecks. But the business world — especially the part of it that hasn’t happened yet and is coming close enough to make our stomachs twist — is a big, wild, mess.

I started Wild Garden as an exploration of that mess. It’s been a slow rolling hunch, a snowball of intel stolen from professors, books, coworkers, and mentors like Rob (who calls the mess “chaos”). There’s a quote attributed to Einstein that “adversity introduces a man to himself.” This exploration is an embrace of consistency, effort, and adversity, and a relinquishment of control. The constant state isn’t stasis, but movement.

Once I started looking I saw little bottlenecks everywhere. Moments of planning meeting reality:

Last year I set a goal to ride my bike 40 miles a week. I’ve hit that almost every week this year, minus a couple injured or lazy ones. Sometimes I was way over, sometimes under, and it was always difficult. Some of my best moments of self-examination have come during a modest headwind and at 160 bpm. (I have, literally, yelled at the wind).

I still surf on average about six days a week. Cold mornings and heavy oceanic beatings will remind you where you stand. Moments like this though, from this morning, buoy a high high in between them.

My relationship with my girlfriend’s kindergartener is pure self-confrontation. When I’m alone, my house, a bungalow that’s barely 600 square feet, is a tidy museum of bachelorhood. I get inordinate joy out of knowing where everything is (“In its proper place” I hear my dad saying in my head). After she leaves, it’s a mess of toy cars, sticks, rocks, and crumbs, assembled in an impressively disorderly fashion. But I can say earnestly, cleaning up those little messes is its own source of joy, and a souvenir of being in a home full of love.

As Carse writes in Finite and Infinite Games, “One never arrives anywhere with a garden. A garden is a place where growth is found.” Complex environments offer us self-examination. Their bottlenecks are never-ending new ways to find growth.

—

I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben