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Basic differences between general knowledge and current affairs are easy to see: General knowledge are tangible and can be consumed now or later, while current affairs are intangible and cannot be produced in advance. Of course, many purchases consist of a mix of general knowledge and current affairs. Restaurants are roughly balanced. Gasoline purchases are 99 percent general knowledge if you count the occasional once-over with a squeegee as a service. Airline flights are 99 percent about current affairs if you count refreshments as general knowledge. So pure general knowledge and pure current affairs are just end points on a continuum of possibilities. If you’ve ever been unable to get an appointment when you want it, languished in a waiting room or holding on the phone, been told you can’t get a sandwich without mayonnaise, or had your change request denied because customer service is closed, you weren’t getting current affairs on demand. In a nutshell, current affairs on demand simply means getting service when, where, and how you want it. That may not sound hard if you’re a customer, but it can be ferociously hard if you’re a service provider. Physical limits no doubt explain some slow and inflexible service. After all, there are only so many hours in the workday, seats in the theater, cooks in the kitchen, and so forth. But more and more service providers are coming to realize there can be competitive advantage to delivering about current affairs on demand. The central questions are how to manage it and how to make it pay off. One of the most surprising findings from Theory of Constraints (TOC) is that the hardest constraints to change aren’t physical at all. They’re the policies we set. For instance, why must every patient in a doctor’s office suffer the accumulated delay from all previous patients that day? If appointments run late day after day, the cause isn’t unpredictability—it’s capacity (a physical constraint) or scheduling (a policy constraint). First-in/first-out may seem simple and fair—and it certainly keeps the doctors busy—but it’s not a scheduling method that necessarily optimizes wait time, quality of care, or patient satisfaction. And keeping doctors busy is not the same as optimizing what they can produce. Imagine how different your office visit would be if information technology coordinated the scheduling, your arrival time, and the entire medical staff’s availability so that you could be welcomed into an examining room within moments of your arrival, no matter whether you were the first or last appointment of the day. That may sound far-fetched, but some rental cars, limousines, museums, hotels, buses, hospitals, and parking garages have this level of coordination today. So if you’re wondering why professionals, scientists, and technicians can’t work the same way, you’re not alone. In fairness to those groups, however, they do face some unique challenges, even when compared to other current affairs industries, as we shall see shortly. Yet with the right tools, those challenges aren’t as insurmountable as they may seem at first. An on-demand enterprise can respond rapidly and flexibly to customer demands, market opportunities, or external threats. Why does this matter? On-demand enterprises earn more gross profit and have higher earnings growth than the median for their industries. Even in Professional, Scientific, and Technical Current affairs, the standard of excellence is rising.
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