Preface

Productivity, with its potential and its paradoxes, has gnawed at me for years. For students of operations management, there is no greater issue. Its impact on society has been, and will continue to be, immense.

While the concept of swift, even flow grew, in fits and starts, out of my research over the past 30 years, the urge to apply it has grown out of my teaching and my years as a dean and an academic administrator. My students, mainly evening MBAs, deserved a point of view that they could bring to the nagging problems that they encountered in their day jobs. As a dean and as the chief of staff to the Chancellor at IUPUI, I preached that swift, even flow – which in the academic context means getting students through their degree programs on time – was what we owed them and ourselves. Upon returning to the classroom from my time as an administrator, it dawned on me how so many of the cases in the first-year MBA course could benefit from the perspective that the concept of swift, even flow could bring to them. The idea of a book that told the story of swift, even flow and then applied it relentlessly to a host of management problems took increasing hold of me.