Constraints for Lawyers?

Here is a good practical introduction to the Theory of Constraints from the Juice Analytics blog.  The author is going to try imposing these constraints on his company:

• Create artificial deadlines with teeth. Something real and bad has to happen when a project extends beyond a deadline. What if a team had to write a document describing why a deadline was missed?
• Limit design freedom with less space, fewer colors, fewer tabs and buttons. At Juice, we recently found that we had some fairly radical limitations on the space available to create a web interface. What started as an annoyance helped us take some great steps forward.
• Cap team size. What if you limited every team to five or fewer people? Just imagine the efficiencies and focus — and all the people you could legitimately exclude!
• Try without money. What if you had no marketing budget for a new product? I bet most of the companies that succeed with viral marketing are those that need to. Big companies admire the power of using customers as a salesforce — but advertising is so much more well understood.

As the author notes, “There is pain in fitting into constraints. And it isn’t always worth it. But there can be pay-offs in innovation, efficiency and focus.”   Where can you utilize the Theory of Constraints in your practice? 

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