Bottlenecks

Eli Goldratt wrote that in any operation of any sort, bottlenecks are the critical points where the entire process can slow down or even stall out. I tend to agree with him. Bottlenecks are the most evil, pernicious, torturous constraints known to mankind. They waste your time and cost you money, and worse yet, force you to focus your attention away from your mission.

A bottleneck needs to be eliminated at all costs, with all guns blazing and artillery coming in too. Run for your life from anyone who proposes that bottlenecks can and should be managed. If you find in your life that you are working around bottlenecks instead of eliminating them, you are sacrificing long-term prosperity for short-term relief. Your only real options are to push forward or get the hell out of the way. If you choose neither, you have become a bottleneck yourself.

Traffic is the most obvious bottleneck of widespread public knowledge, and things like traffic lights and stop signs are only managers of bottlenecks. They don't eliminate the problem completely, they just slow the process of movement down enough so that there are no catastrophes. But in the end, the collective congestion is a larger catastrophe in itself.

For the last couple of weeks, our bottleneck has been the legal process of getting our partnership established. No accounts can be opened at any financial firm without it. Without accounts opened, investors cannot send in money, nor can we pay routine bills. Without that, we are not in business.

Fortunately, during this slow process, we have accomplished a great deal since moving in that we would have been hard pressed to complete later. I am happy to announce that the legal process has been completed, and we are once again full steam ahead. We should have wiring instructions to send to investors by Monday. Launch date is first business day of January.

On a side note, we hope to have our Bloomberg in place by the end of the year. Our strategy depends heavily on a highly detailed level of data that only Bloomberg can provide.