Chapter Summary Of The Book When It's Not Luck

It's not luck is an extremely well written book that mixed fiction with solid business and human-relations principles. The book demonstrates a lot about theory of constraints. This made it very easy to read and it was almost hard to put down. Alex and his team have been promoted to a key position in their corporation. Great pressure is put on Alex and his team to turn the faltering business around. In the book Alex’s main goal is to help out three companies ICosmetics, the printing company and the pressure steam company. He is trying to come up with ideas on how to help them get a fair price if the company decides to sell them. In the story Alex emphasizes the thinking process and the importance of using it not only in the business world but in personal life situations too. Alex utilizes the thinking skill quite a bit in the book. The five thinking skills are evaporating cloud, current reality tree, future reality tree, transition tree, and negative branch reservation. Alex uses the evaporating cloud, which is also, known as the negotiation cloud in the second chapter to help resolve a family situation on weather or not his daughter can stay out late. He also uses this in the third chapter when dealing with the printing company, which is marginally profitable, but they have some issues with the wrapper department this leads
to the question of how they can compete for short runs but not long runs. The current reality tree is a cause and effect notions and is used in chapter 15 to figure out the core problems that are causing all of the undesirable effects.
Next the Future reality is used in chapter 20 to get a better idea of what they need to do for the future. Chapter 23 ended with two months of lost sales hanging over Alex’s teams head. Which leads us chapter 24 and they negative branch reservation. Alex writes out the negative branch and asks how they are going to trim the negative outcomes. As they use this thinking skill they work through the problem and figure out that it will work with just a few simple
modifications. The final thinking process is the transition tree, this process involves laying out a step by step plan to help move from the current situation to the planned situation. This is done in chapter 27 Alex goes through all the steps to show how they are going to get a great end marketing solution for ICosmetics. Firs he starts with laying out the core problems in the market. Next he shows them that by changing their current policy they can solve the core problems in the market. Then Alex brought out the negative branch tree to add what each board member raised as a problem. Then Alex calculates how much UniCo will receive from ICosmetics in the next 4 months. This shows that they will make more money off the operations of the company then they would if they were to sell it.