(2025-12-24) Ching I Think Was My Best Work In 2025

Clark Chin: This, I think, was my best work in 2025. The Bottleneck Detective Manifesto. It’s short. It’s sweet. It is - if I’m honest - incomplete.

But, from where I’m sitting, down here at the fun end of the New Zealand summer, looking back at 30 years working with (and living inside) The Theory of Constraints, I think Eli Goldratt got it wrong. Eli was a physicist by training, and he wanted to teach people the “Physics of Business”. That limited ToC. All drumbeat, not enough heartbeat. All forensics, not enough street smarts. Detectives are better role-models for managers, leaders and problem solvers than physicists. Because that’s actually what Eli taught us: how to think like a detective. He was - like all of us - making things up as he went along. Maybe it’s time we stopped thinking of it as a “scientific” theory and started calling it what it is: detective work.