Eliyahu M. Goldratt (1947–2011)

Just want to say it was a gripping read. A rare thing to say about a business/management book. I’m almost never interested in the facts spitted out in most books - even science books. Tell me how you arrived at that.

Of all the things I could learn from this book, I learnt for the first time in my life the *periodic* nature of the periodic table. It clicked because the author was inquisitive - “how do we find order from seemingly random things?” And the quest for “intrinsic order”. show more

The dialog/conversational way of delivering a concept - the Socratic way - is long and winding for some people but information sticks. Precisely because the information isn’t provided in a platter. Allegories and analogies when done right helps you understand a concept quite well and I think this book did it quite well. show less

A lot of clichés in the writing, but presenting flow and the theory of constraints in a fictional story works surprisingly well. For the most part I wanted to keep reading because of the story. The story also makes me remember the key points really well. The explanation is less clear in the end though, and the story could have been much shorter while still getting the points through.

This book while written during a previous era, the '80s is still very much applicable and maybe even more so nowadays with the challenging global supply chain dynamics and on again off again tariffs debacle. Working in manufacturing for my entire career this book together with the Toyota Way is required reading about continuous improvement of the manufacturing process. The story telling manner in which the concepts are delivered is captivating and interesting. This is probably the only book show more that my kids also got into which tells you about the simple manner in which complex concepts are covered. For the book summary go here - https://www.tocinstitute.org/the-goal-summary.html. Looking forward to implementing these principles in my new gig. show less

Three word review: re-contextualizes business effectiveness

The Goal is an extraordinarily interesting book written in a novel format. It takes us on a journey of a
manufacturing plant manager, Alex, whose plant is losing money. He is given an ulitmatum to turn the plant around in 90 days "or else".

Alex runs into an old professor, Jonah, who sympathizes with his dilemma and offers some possible
courses of investigation. The running theme through the novel is Alex hitting a wall and Jonah show more pointing him into the right direction.

At the heart of the matter is what Goldratt calls the "Theory of Constraints". This lays out how
Alex's plant hits the roadblocks that are causing late orders, rushing, angry customers, stressed workers other general chaos.

In Alex's plant, and as it would turn out in many organizations, the workflows are not optimal,
or to be more accurate, they are locally optimized but globally inefficient.

Jonah explains how optimizing throughput at bottlenecks will increase overall efficiency, even if
it lowers local efficiencies elsewhere. This goes contrary to the then-dominiant theory of local optimization.

Goldratt lays this out with Alex taking his son's Boy Scout troop on a hike. There is a scout, named Herbie, who walks more slowly than the other hikers. When Herbie is in the middle of the line, no one behind him can go any faster than he can, but the hikers ahead can continue at the average pace. As a result the gap between the first and last hiker continues to grow, until the hikers at the front need to stop so everyone behind them can catch up.

This problem is resolved by moving Herbie to the front of the line, reducing the average speed but
keeping throughput consistent. When the other hikers complain about the speed, Alex goes through
Herbie's pack and quite literally lightens his load, increasing his hiking speed and thus the speed of
the entire group.

When Alex returns to the plant, he sets his team to work finding the "Herbies" or bottlenecks which are choking the workflow. Though they cannot move the bottlenecks (two particular machine processes) to the front of the line, they can optimize the throughput at those resources.

Though this is discussed in the material manufacturing context, it is applicable to any organization,
and the case studies provided in the 20th anniversary edition illustrate this in manufacturing, education, and service organizations.

As these optimizations are made, other opportunities reveal themselves. Soon new bottlenecks emerge and Alex and his team are at it again.

In the end the "goal" is to make money. The "five focusing questions" are defined broadly after they
are first implemented in Alex's plant. This is one of the key parts of the book. The five questions are:

1. Find the Bottleneck (aka Herbie)
refined: Identify the constraint
(the resource or policy that moves the oganization away from the goal)

2. Reduce the impact of the bottleneck. (Figure out how to make Herbie a better hiker)
refined: Decide how to exploit the constraint
(make sure the constraint's time is not wasted doing things that it should not do)

3. The bottleneck determines throughput, always
refined: Subordinate all other processes to above decision
(align the whole system or organization to support the decision made above)

4. Increase bandwidth (sorry, I'm a tech guy).
refined: Elevate the constraint
(if required or possible, permanently increase capacity of the constraint; "buy more")

5. Rinse and repeat.
refined: If, as a result of these steps, the constraint has moved, return to Step 1. Don't let inertia become the constraint.

I found the narrative of the story to be incredibly helpful in contextualizing these concepts.
Another plot of the story is the trouble Alex is having in his marriage. They use similar focusing
questions to determine how and why things were going wrong and what to do to fix it. The repetition of relevant themes in different contexts really drives the points home and makes them stick.

Eventually the constraints move outside of the plant, and the plant has wasted potential throughput. The constraint is now with the marketing department. Alex pushes for a bigger slice of the business as the backlog clears and turnaround becomes more predictable.

Once this constraint is removed, the constraint moves back into the plant at the non-bottlenecks.
It's an interesting illustration of how the throughput demands change as capacity increases.
I see this a lot at my own job and it really drove the point home to have that context.

Throughout the course of the novel, Alex rises from at-risk employee to division manager, while
converting those around him into his (or rather, Jonah's) way of thinking. Jonah continues with his Socratic Method style of asking pointed questions and giving Alex enough room to figure it out. As someone very familiar with Plato, I found this to be familiar, though it would be a new approach for non philosophers.

I found the book to be well written, highly readable, broadly scoped and extremely insightful. It does more than lay out a course of action, it proactively details the value in establishing such a course and furthermore provides a mindset for building such a course based on a common-sense approach (the latter of which was lacking in my reading of "Emotional Intelligence")

As Alex begins his ascent into management, he finds himself in the familiar dilemma of not knowing where to turn. Jonah pulls away at this point and tells him to come up with the specific questions he
needs answered. This leads to a discussion which ultimately bares the following three questions:

What to change
What to change to
How to cause the change

Again, Goldratt's common sense approach and plain English explanation provides valuable insight into resolving complicated business problems, simply by asking the right people the right questions and addressing root causes, not symptoms.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in improving organization performance
or building a better understanding of these crucial concepts. They are as applicable today as they were when the book was written (the mid 80s), and written such that you dont need an MBA to decode the jargon. show less