"Not yet," I say.
"Oh," she says. "Well, let me see... it isn't Mothers' Day..."
"Mom, I'm just here to look for something."
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"Look for something? Look for what?" she asks, turning to let me in. "Come in, come in. You're letting all the cold inside. Boy, you gave me a scare. Here you are in town and you never come to see me anymore. What's the matter? You too important now for your old mother?"
"No, of course not, Mom. I've been very busy at the plant," I say.
"Busy, busy," she says leading the way to the kitchen. "You hungry?"
"No, listen, I don't want to put you to any trouble," I say.
She says, "Oh, it's no trouble. I got some ziti I can heat up. You want a salad too?"
"No, listen, a cup of coffee will be fine. I just need to find my old address book," I tell her. "It's the one I had when I was in college. Do you know where it might be?"
We step into the kitchen.
"Your old address book..." she muses as she pours a cup of coffee from the percolator. "How about some cake? Danny brought some day-old over last night from the store."
"No thanks, Mom. I'm fine," I say. "It's probably in with all my old notebooks and stuff from school."
She hands me the cup of coffee. "Notebooks..."
"Yeah, you know where they might be?"
Her eyes blink. She's thinking.
"Well... no. But I put all that stuff up in the attic," she says.
"Okay, I'll go look there," I say.
Coffee in hand, I head for the stairs leading to the second floor and up into the attic.
"Or it might all be in the basement," she says.
Three hours later-after dusting through the drawings I made in the first grade, my model airplanes, an assortment of musical instruments my brother once attempted to play in his quest to become a rock star, my yearbooks, four steamer trunks filled with receipts from my fatber's business, old love letters, old snapshots, old newspapers, old you-name-it-the address book is still at large. We give up on the attic. My mother prevails upon me to have some ziti. Then we try the basement.
"Oh, look!" says my mother.
"Did you find it?" I ask.
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"No, but here's a picture of your Uncle Paul before he was arrested for embezzlement. Did I ever tell you that story?"
After another hour, we've gone through everything, and I've had a refresher course in all there is to know about Uncle Paul. Where the hell could it be?
"Well, I don't know," says my mother. "Unless it could be in your old room."
We go upstairs to the room I used to share with Danny. Over in the corner is the old desk where I used to study when I was a kid. I open the top drawer. And, of course, there it is.
"Mom, I need to use your phone."
My mother's phone is located on the landing of the stairs between the floors of the house. It's the same phone that was installed in 1936 after my father began to make enough money from the store to afford one. I sit down on the steps, a pad of paper on my lap, briefcase at my feet. I pick up the receiver, which is heavy enough to bludgeon a burglar into submission. I dial the number, the first of many.
It's one o'clock by now. But I'm calling Israel, which happens to be on the other side of the world from us. And vice versa. Which roughly means their days are our nights, our nights are their mornings, and consequently, one in the morning is not such a bad time to call.
Before long, I've reached a friend I made at the university, someone who knows what's become of Jonah. He finds me an- other number to call. By two o'clock, I've got the tablet of paper on my lap covered with numbers I've scribbled down, and I'm talking to some people who work with Jonah. I convince one of them to give me the number where I can reach him. By three o'clock, I've found him. He's in London. After several transfers here and there across some office of some company, I'm told that he will call me when he gets in. I don't really believe that, but I doze by the phone. And forty-five minutes later, it rings.
"Alex?"
It's his voice.
"Yes, Jonah," I say.
"I got a message you had called."
"Right," I say. "You remember our meeting in O'Hare."
"Yes, of course I remember it," he says. "And I presume you have something to tell me now."
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I freeze for a moment. Then I realize he's referring to his question, what is the goal?
"Right," I say.
"Well?"
I hesitate. My answer seems so ludicrously simple I am sud- denly afraid that it must be wrong, that he will laugh at me. But I blurt it out.
"The goal of a manufacturing organization is to make money," I say to him. "And everything else we do is a means to achieve the goal."
But Jonah doesn't laugh at me.
"Very good, Alex. Very good," he says quietly.
"Thanks," I tell him. "But, see, the reason I called was to ask you a question that's kind of related to the discussion we had at O'Hare."
"What's the problem?" he asks.
"Well, in order to know if my plant is helping the company make money, I have to have some kind of measurements," I say. "Right?"
"That's correct," he says.
"And I know that up in the executive suite at company head- quarters, they've got measurements like net profit and return on investment and cash flow, which they apply to the overall organi- zation to check on progress toward the goal."
"Yes, go on," says Jonah.
"But where I am, down at the plant level, those measure- ments don't mean very much. And the measurements I use inside the plant... well, I'm not absolutely sure, but I don't think they're really telling the whole story," I say.
"Yes, I know exactly what you mean," says Jonah.
"So how can I know whether what's happening in my plant is truly productive or non-productive?" I ask.
For a second, it gets quiet on the other end of the line. Then I hear him say to somebody with him, "Tell him I'll be in as soon as I'm through with this call."
Then he speaks to me.
"Alex, you have hit upon something very important," he says. "I only have time to talk to you for a few minutes, but perhaps I can suggest a few things which might help you. You see, there is more than one way to express the goal. Do you understand? The goal stays the same, but we can state it in differ-
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ent ways, ways which mean the same thing as those two words, 'making money.' '
"Okay," I answer, "so I can say the goal is to increase net profit, while simultaneously increasing both ROI and cash flow, and that's the equivalent of saying the goal is to make money."
"Exactly," he says. "One expression is the equivalent of the other. But as you have discovered, those conventional measure- ments you use to express the goal do not lend themselves very well to the daily operations of the manufacturing organization. In fact, that's why I developed a different set of measurements."
"What kind of measurements are those?" I ask.
"They're measurements which express the goal of making money perfectly well, but which also permit you to develop oper- ational rules for running your plant," he says. "There are three of them. Their names are throughput, inventory and operational expense."
"Those all sound familiar," I say.
"Yes, but their definitions are not," says Jonah. "In fact, you will probably want to write them down,"
Pen in hand, I flip ahead to a clean sheet of paper on my tablet and tell him to go ahead.
"Throughput," he says, "is the rate at which the system gen- erates money through sal e s ."
I write it down word for word.
Then I ask, "But what about production? Wouldn't it be more correct to say-"
"No," he says. "Through sal e s -not production. If you pro- duce something, but don't sell it, it's not throughput. Got it?"