I had to write the book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because I had read hundreds of self-help books and books on business strategy, administration, and process improvement, and they were all wrong in some little way. Wrong is, of course, a point of view, but when we wonder why our companies have become so “woke,” we must understand why. We must understand why the Chamber of Commerce types are so bent toward the United Nations and not the United States, and we must know how we arrived where we are, how to get out of it, and toward more of an America First policy. One of the most important books that are most popular among process improvement consultants in business is called The Goal. If you go into the office of most business consultants, you will find it in their libraries. It’s been out since the 1980s and has paralleled the Lean Manufacturing methods that have migrated out of Toyota Management Processes and TQCs and all kinds of Eastern business philosophy acronyms. Through a combination of The Goal, and books like The Machine that Changed the World, which evolved out of Deming consulting in Japan, Americans have been tricked into going against their nature of innovation and aggression as a capitalist enterprise. Out of a United Nations desire for accepting global commerce, global supply chains, and global thinking, these methods have been introduced to American business for all kinds of strictly political reasons. Because of that trend, I felt there needed to be an American answer. I have been teaching the methods talked about in all these books for over three decades, and given where the world is today, its time to point out the flaws in the thinking and assert ourselves in western civilization toward the objectives of retaking the leadership role in the world, from an America First perspective.
I enjoy The Goal; it is an excellent thought experiment for managers looking to improve their processes. It can work fine if the only other alternative is chaos. From my perspective, and this has always been my opinion of the work, it was a soft sell of communism to the corporate world from the author selling capitalism but functioning as a Marx-driven radical. So, it’s no surprise that executives who read the book and study it in detail think they are performing as profit-driven capitalists. They are drooling communists tricked into a global conspiracy based on their lack of knowledge of history and global intentions. The Goal is all about solving plant-wide manufacturing problems, but in essence, it’s about Constraint Theory, knowing your constraints, and working within those limits toward ultimate efficiency. I have a radically different view of Constraint Theory than most everyone else in the world, especially people who practice consulting primarily because they don’t understand the essence of what a “constraint” is or what the history of acquiring it was.
In The Goal, we are told a story about a bunch of Boy Scouts hiking a 10-mile trail, and among them is an overweight kid struggling to keep up with the others by the name of Herbie. The story’s theme is that all the other hikers need to realize that Herbie is their constraint and that they should have been measuring what they can do as a group based on what Herbie could do. Otherwise, they were supposed to bend their processes to the limits of their weakest link. So it is said in business, figure out who your “Herbie” is, and you’ll understand your actual capacity. Well, this has always bothered me. My way of dealing with the “Herbies” of life is to tell him to lose weight or find someone faster and more robust than he is to do the job. But you see, what is taught in corporate politics is that Herbie isn’t to be discriminated against. There are all kinds of woke rules to protect people like Herbie from being pushed out of their comfort zone. Labor unions particularly seek out to employ people like Herbie, natural constraints that slow down a process. Never is the emphasis on speeding something up. So, by default, when corporate leaders read books like The Goal and The Machine that Changed the World, they believe that they are in the business of managing their constraints in diminishing increments. Not to seek to improve those constraints. But to live with them.
In a roundabout way, the government has brought communism into our corporate cultures in this way then used that compliance culture to attack our Constitutional parameters for which a society functions. All “at will” employment thus falls under some form of communist control that we all accept in increments because most of us must work somewhere, and as we do, we lower our guard to these subtle attacks on our way of government on the front end. Then in corporate culture, instead of hiring managers to improve the Herbies of the world, we hire managers and CEOs to mitigate against the compliance mandates that government imposes on us through excessive rules and regulations. Now you can see why the Chamber of Commerce organizations across America were against any vaccine freedoms for individuals. They wish to protect an organization’s ability to defend themselves from more government compliance by backdooring the American Constitution through a company’s HR department. What makes my book different from all other books on this subject matter is that I specifically deal with these kinds of challenges because nobody I have read has ever gone to these levels of thinking on the issue. It’s one thing to identify your constraints and, in using Lean Manufacturing, getting everyone in an organization to understand what reality is. But in The Goal, determining reality is accepting that Herbie is an overweight kid who has a hard time walking 10 miles on a hike. But my attitude is that Herbie needs to lose the weight to keep up with the other kids on that hike. The faster kids who can walk the 10 miles should not be penalized. That is why The Goal is communist propaganda, whether it was intended to be or not.
Nobody, especially most Chambers of Commerce, wants to think of themselves as communists. They think of communists as authoritarian overlords in a military uniform in some broke Central American countries or failed Russia. But the way the work of Karl Marx drove communism survived into this new age remix was to appear as a capitalist boon but to use the mask of global trade and global partnerships to spread communism around the world, as they had always planned. Just change the name of communism to capitalism and make it appear that the effort was to increase profits, not to hinder productivity by giving the means of production over to the government to control. You have your modern scam unfolded before you. And I intend to show people how to get out of that mess. It’s not easy to change the culture of something so embedded in our thoughts and actions. But that’s what The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business does. The Herbie story is just the tip of the iceberg. It goes much deeper than what we’ve talked about here. But it’s a start.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 