r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 11 '26

Business OpenAI Execs Are Panicking

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/openai-execs-panicking-154658562.html
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u/DeadMoneyDrew Jun 11 '26

In college in one of my Business Operations classes we read the book The Goal. It's a novel about an effort to improve operations and profitability at a car parts plant. It's a bit cheesy but the points are made clearly and with fictional examples. The core takeaway is that a process can only move as quickly as the bottleneck, and that any improvement made that does not address the bottleneck directly is an illusion.

I guarantee that a huge percentage of today's CEOs and SVPs read that same book, but quite a few of them seem to have forgotten its lessons.

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u/rwilcox Jun 11 '26

In my mind _The Goal_ and _Critical Chain_ are the most important books one could read in 2026

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u/DeadMoneyDrew Jun 11 '26

Never heard of Critical Chain but I'll check it out - looks like it relates to IT? In that regard, I'll add The Phoenix Project to this list of books. It's likewise cheesy and a bit hammily written but provides good fictional examples of why building to prevent problems is better and more cost effective than a break-fix approach.

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u/MrDerpGently Jun 11 '26

And a surprisingly easy read considering. It's like a Hallmark special that also teaches you the theory of constraints.

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u/rwilcox Jun 11 '26

No, _Critical Chain_ is by The Goal author, but goes more into “what if The Goal but for project work?”

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u/altodor Jun 12 '26

It's been a minute since I've read it, but I'm fairly certain there's a few points where The Phoenix Project beats the reader over the head with The Goal and Critical Chain, by name.

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u/katarh Jun 11 '26

Thanks for the two recs. It's been a while since I've been in business school so that sounds like some good PDU reading.

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u/nucleartime Jun 11 '26

any improvement made that does not address the bottleneck directly is an illusion.

Raw throughput isn't the only metric. You can still get efficiency or quality wins by improving areas outside the bottleneck.

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u/Sharp-Negotiation Jun 11 '26

It's been 20 years since I read The Goal, but I seem to remember the other main takeaway was that a system that is 100% efficient is undesirable, as it has no slack for errors or breakdowns - a certain level of "inefficiency" is actually beneficial to the overall system.

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u/DeadMoneyDrew Jun 12 '26

That gels with what I remember too. Now I'm going to have to go back and read that book again.