The strategic pursuit of value

According to Coyne and Subramaniam, The McKinsey Quarterly, 1996, Number 4, a strategy is the handful of decisions that:

Mar 20 • BRYAN PFLUG

Putting production on a diet

The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.” - Shigeo Shingo

Mar 19 • BRYAN PFLUG

Converging on useful solutions

You can’t always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes you find you get what you need - Mick Jagger, Rolling Stones

Mar 18 • BRYAN PFLUG

2

A Production Operating System

Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets - W. Edwards Deming

Mar 13 • BRYAN PFLUG

February 2026

The essence of a good plan

A good plan describes the strategy, approach, and jobs which will be taken to accomplish a set of objectives.

Feb 21 • BRYAN PFLUG

January 2026

The essence of a good schedule

Plans are nothing; planning is everything - Dwight D. Eisenhower

Jan 28 • BRYAN PFLUG

2

A scorecard of popular frameworks

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. - Yogi Berra

Jan 26 • BRYAN PFLUG

1

1

December 2025

Profit beyond measure

Satisfactory business results follow from nurturing the company’s system (the ‘means’), not from manipulating and wrenching its processes to achieve…

Dec 19, 2025 • BRYAN PFLUG

1

Communicating concepts of operations

If you don’t capture and validate key concepts meaningfully, you’ll end up managing chaos instead of operations as a logical consequence

Dec 17, 2025 • BRYAN PFLUG

November 2025

The root causes of failures in control-oriented endeavors

No plan survives contact with the enemy - Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Nov 26, 2025 • BRYAN PFLUG

1

Tensions between autonomy and control

If communication cannot achieve consensus, we must live with the broken pieces of unfulfilled expectations and recognize the failure of dialogue, trust…

Nov 15, 2025 • BRYAN PFLUG

1

Diagnosing organizational behaviors

People are happy to add to the pharmacopoeia; they forget to swallow the medicine

Nov 9, 2025 • BRYAN PFLUG