Ching's most explicitly business-and-finance-oriented work, published around 2025 as a Kindle edition. Where most of Ching's writing addresses software practitioners, team leads, and engineering managers, this guide targets CFOs — an audience that typically sits outside the Agile conversation but whose decisions directly constrain what Agile teams can accomplish.
The central argument is that software teams, properly organized around TOC and Agile principles, can become reliable profit centers rather than cost centers. This reframing — from IT-as-overhead to IT-as-throughput-engine — is a direct application of toc-for-software-development to the financial vocabulary that CFOs use. The title's "cash cows" metaphor signals the ambition: not just adequate teams, but high-yield investments.
bottleneck-thinking provides the operational logic: a CFO who understands where the constraint sits in the software delivery system can make better capital allocation decisions, resist pressure to add headcount in the wrong places, and protect the investments that actually drive throughput. This connects to the broader TOC insight that local efficiency metrics — the standard tools of financial management — often obscure system-level performance.
The work represents a late-career expansion of Ching's audience beyond the Agile and TOC communities where he built his reputation. It connects to his consulting practice through oddsocks-consulting, where engaging with financial leadership is often necessary to create the organizational conditions for the work he describes in rolling-rocks-downhill and the-bottleneck-rules.
The book belongs to the bottleneck-guy-brand-period, when Ching was working to extend TOC ideas into new organizational domains.