Eli Goldratt MIT visit and federal-government constraint claim

Closing critique — the Theory of Constraints author proposing to apply his single-constraint heuristic to a trillion-dollar operation.

Eli Goldratt became very popular. He came here in the early '90s, and I was invited to listen to his lecture and have lunch with him and a bunch of the other LFM professors. There was a restaurant — it used to be the faculty club on the top floor of the Sloan building, sixth floor — and we sat in this conference room. Somebody asked Eli what he was working on now. He was working on figuring out how to manage governments, like the U.S. federal government. He was going to find the constraint and manage that. Now, the federal government is a trillion dollar operation — is there only one constraint in the federal government? That was his assumption. He was gonna find that constraint. That makes life easy, right? So Eli Goldratt was a paragon of simplicity and irrelevance.