The Goal: a process of Ongoing Improvement

DW: It sounds like one of the main conclusions you reached was that the
perceived constraint—the regulatory climate—was not the actual
constraint.

---

RP: Correct. I would walk into the office of my compliance officer and I’d
say, “Jeff, I got this idea.” And he would just automatically point to this
poster on his wall that basically said: If you can dream it, there’s a regulation
for it.
DW: And yet even in that environment, you found ways to grow.
RP: We did things in the banking industry that were totally unheard of. We
actually had regulators visit us more often than other banks because those
other banks kept calling them and saying: “They’ve got to be doing
something illegal, you need to check them out.”

---

Interview 
with 
David 
Harrison
,
Administrative Services,
Founder, Positive Solutions, Newcastle, U.K.
DW: Tell me about Positive Solutions.
DH: We provide management and administrative services to independent
financial advisors. At present we have 755 of those people who rely upon us
to help them with such things as compliance with financial services
regulations, collection of commissions, and so forth. That’s the company we
built, 60% of which we sold recently to the Aegon group, one of the world’s
largest insurers.
DW: How have you made use of 
The Goal
?
DH: In a couple of ways. First and foremost we use the five focusing steps
almost instinctively now, in that we seek to identify the constraint in any
problem before we do anything else. That’s sort of been my mantra, if you
like—before we go any farther, let’s identify the constraint.
Beyond that, a big part of what we do is acquire new independent financial
advisors—we want people to join our organization, and the people we use to
recruit them we call our business consultants. Oded Cohen, of Goldratt UK,
helped us build a process for that. He broke it down into very discrete steps
and helped us program software which helps us track how each of our
business consultants is succeeding, or not. At any point in time they may
have 150-200 people they’re having conversations with about joining
Positive Solutions. We’ve got them to think of each of those people as a
project. That streamlined the process and also got our business consultants to
think in a more logical fashion.