The basic story is built around the dilemmas facing Alex Rogo, a newly-appointed plant manager. The plant can't seem to ship, it's losing money, and bad things can happen to good people if all this doesn't change soon. Alex is at a loss for what to do until he pulls out a cigar that Jonah, a physicist from Israel, had recently given him. That cigar reminds him to contact Jonah for possible help. From there, the path to recovery begins.

Let me describe some of the many levels on which this novel is valuable.

First, the book explains how to see businesses as systems as well as any other book on this subject. It compares favorably in this area to such important works as The Fifth Discipline and the Fifth Discipline Handbook. The metaphor of how to speed up a slow-moving group of boy scouts will be visceral to anyone who has done any hiking with a group.

Second, the book helps you learn how to improve the performance of a system by providing you with a replicable process that you can apply to analyzing any human or engineering system. The primary metaphor is improving a manufacturing process, but the same principles apply more broadly to other circumstances.

Third, you will experience the power of the Socratic method as a way to stimulate your mind to learn, and to use Socratic questions to stimulate the minds of others to become better thinkers and doers.

Fourth, the authors also use problem simulation as a practical way to help you experience the learning process they are advocating.

Fifth, the book is unusually good in bringing home the consequences of letting your business process run in a vicious cycle: Your family life may also.

The pacing of the book is especially good. You are given time to stew with issues and come up with your own ideas before sample answers are provided by Alex and his staff in the novel.

Unlike many books that take complicated ideas and oversimplify them so the ideas lose their meaning, this book simplifies ideas in ways that enhance their meaning by making the ideas easier to see and employ.

If you do not understand all of the ins and outs of typical factory accounting, you may get a little lost from time to time. But that's not a problem. That accounting just distorts common perceptions of what needs to be done. You can safely skip anything you don't understand if you don't have to deal with such issues.

While I did not observe any overt errors in the book, companies that do not put an asset charge on operational assets could make the mistake from this book of seeking too little profit. You need to earn on-going returns that exceed your cost of capital, too.

You will get the most from this book if you read The Fifth Discipline following it (if you have not read that book already). The discussion of the beer game simulation in The Fifth Discipline will add to your understanding of system dynamics.

Following that book, I suggest that you then read The Balanced Scorecard and The Strategy-Focused Organization for ideas about how to use goals, measurements, and rewards to concentrate attention onto the highest leverage areas for your system.

After you have finished employing what you have learned and helping others around you to learn more also, I suggest that you think about how to optimize the full upside potential more rapidly through the use of irresistible forces and 2,000 percent solutions to speed your progress. That should leave you with even more success and more time to enjoy it.

Unblock the constraints on your progress!


Making Informed Decisions   December 17, 1999
 71 out of 74 found this review helpful

In its simplest form, The Goal is about making effective and informed decisions. The author, Eliyahu Goldratt, takes his readers on a very thorough, step-by-step discovery of the many fallacies and misconceptions invading much of the way today's society views and measures the production process. Gradratt conveys his message in novel form by relaying the struggles of a man, Alex Rogo, who is trying to figure out a way to not only save his career but also save his marriage.

Goldratt's brilliance is displayed through his thoughtful description of the production process, the necessary changes to the process and his careful thought processes described in such a way so even a layman could understand. The author stimulates your thought processes and compels you to join Alex Rogo in his search for answers. At first glance, The Goal, seems to be an informative research about how to be successful. However, you quickly realize that you are caught up in the life of Alex Rogue, a plant manager, who does not even know if he will have a job in a few months and you become entranced in the story of his life and you want to continue reading. Alex makes some important discoveries in his journey through the production process that enhances and sharpens his critical thinking skills. These epiphanies are transformative not only to the Alex Rogo but also the reader.

Realizing he had very little time left to make some very important changes, Alex Rogo remembered an old friend of his, named Jonah, which he had recently bumped into at an airport. They had chatted about the problems of the plant and Jonah asked him some very pointed questions that caused Alex to start thinking. Throughout the book Jonah never tells Alex what it is he needs to do, which would seem simple. Instead Jonah guides Alex in the right direction by using questions to keep him thinking along the right lines. Because Alex leads himself through his problems using logic and common sense his answers are simple, so simple he has a hard time finding them sometimes. For example, Alex had a very difficult time figuring out the link between dependent events and statistical fluctuations. However, after a thought provoking hiking trip with his son's Boy Scout troop he discovers some simple processes that he uses to help turn his plant in the right direction. Another interesting discovery he made involved identifying and treating the bottlenecks, secondly he found that he could do something about them. After discovering the bottlenecks and finding that the throughput of the bottlenecks was the throughput of the plant, Alex found ways to increase the capacity of the bottlenecks thereby increasing the bottom line. With some simple changes that went against all the standard universal manufacturing principles he was able to fill all of his late orders and start getting the products to the customers by the specified due date or perhaps a little earlier.

Eliyahu Goldratt tactfully disseminates the common beliefs about today's production process. He demonstrates the side effects of these practices and illustrates the necessary changes in order for success. For example, when Alex and his staff realized that cutting the production lot size in half not only decreased inventory and increased throughput but also increased sales, they could promise shorter delivery times.

One of the most amazing things about The Goal, which was aggravating at first, was that Goldratt never communicated the product that was being manufactured. This was a clever way of encouraging the reader to focus on the process and the decisions being made rather than the product itself. The author was communicating that these transformations can take place in any process by using informed decision making skills instead of relying on a current process. The previous decisions and processes that Alex Rogo was making were based on tradition not critical thinking. As he saw his job and the jobs of many others start to deteriorate he started thinking through the process very carefully and he found many errors and misconceptions in the current systematic approach. Alex proved to his company that common sense is certainly not to be ignored for the sake of tradition.

Business students taking Operations Reseach/Management Science courses, will find The Goal to be very encompassing, bringing to light many unclear ideas about the production process as well as leaving them with enhanced critical thinking skills. The author conveyed, without expressly stating it, that it is important that you analyze why and how you are doing it and not to rely on the process to always be right. Most of the book I found myself contemplating the very issues in question, wondering if there really was an answer that would solve the problem or problems. And after a discovery would be made I would say to myself, of course! How could I have forgotten about... . Eliyahu Goldratt led me through the thoughts of Alex Rogo and I made the decision breakthroughs with Alex and became excited in the findings. I found this book to be a captivating reading assignment that sparked students interest and they many valuable lessons about managerial decision making.


The Goal: make me jab garden shears in my Eyes   December 5, 2005
 51 out of 92 found this review helpful

If Eliyahu M. Goldratt's astonishingly pretentious, enragingly smug, and eyeball-rippingly turgid "The Goal" is the answer---well, it must have been a pretty stupid question.

The real Goal here, I'm convinced, is this: to drive poor First year MBA students, tasked with getting something out of this colossal yawner, into jamming garden shears into their eyes.

What is "The Goal" like? Imagine Ayn Rand, with, say, 1/10th her intellect, deciding to put aside her pursuit of excellence and theories of individualism and liberty, and instead devote her life's work to---ummm---studying the best way of moving widgets around a factory in a dying industrial town.

Take the usual stock Rand characters, dumb them way down, render them featureless, whiney, unctuous little cog-toads without a scrap of verve or intelligence, and then barf them into a bunch of platitudes, taped together with a lot of whining, lip-biting worry and doubt, and packaged up with a whole Sunday serving of sixties pseudo-Zen crapola---all when a nugget of common sense and a halfway competent editor would have done the job.

It's like Deepak Chopra for the Rust Belt-set.

"The Goal": a soupy, syrupy little exegesis on throughput and Operations 101, amped up to sound like high-falutin' wisdom, crammed down the throats of MBAs throughout the country who are supposed to sit down at the gouty feet of Elihu M. Goldratt (hey, wasn't that the name of the Enemy of the State in 1984 on all the hate rallies?)and worship.

And why? Because this kind of New-Age hippy neo-business pap and babble is wound together with an uncritical worship of GE's goofy Six-Sigma scientology-lite culture, less a model of business success---the real success at GE has nothing to do with Six Sigma, and everything to do with GE's ruthless monopoly business model and sheer humongous size---than an outgrowth of former CEO "Neutron" Jack Welch's super-sized ego and relentless hunger for self-promotion.

The whole tedious setup revolves around Alex Rogaine, a middle-manager stuck in a dying manufacturing company, in a dying town, simultaneously struggling with his dying marriage. Rogaine has to get things under control and profitable muy pronto!, baby, or Corporate is gonna shutter the whole operation and next thing ya know, Michael Moore will be hitting the beaches with a new Business is Bad docu-drama.

So what does Rogaine do? He whines! He bites his lip! He wheedles to his harpy of a wife, who has contempt for this whiney creature with the spine of a jellyfish.

Worse still, he starts stalking his old college physics professor Jonah, who has given off teaching the Five Easy Pieces for 30 grand a year and started jet-setting around the world as a Management Consultant (warning bells going off yet? Getting that late-1990's feeling again?) offering up his Profound Wisdom to other Jet-Setters, Movers & Shakers, and Titans of Industry.

Jonah agrees to meet Rogaine in the Great Barrington airport, and tells him---mystically, with that sh*t-eating grin shared by fortune tellers and McKinsey consultants the world over, that his complex, baffling, soul-devouring problem is really simple: it's all about finding The Goal. And then he shuffles off into the Admiral's Club for a martini.

Rogaine spends the next 180 pages or so pushing his 45 points of IQ to the limit: what, in the name of God, is the Goal? What is it? Is it Love? Money? Freaky sex? Is that what makes this town the Best? What is it?

In between bouts of soul-searing self-doubt and high-octane lip-biting, he stalks Jonah for more answers, and it's always the same: Jonah materializes for a few minutes, serves up more of that same psycho-babble and sh*t-eating grin bullsh*t, drops a few names, and disappears for a martini, or maybe a vodka gimlet, in the Admiral's Lounge.

And Rogaine is left to wonder: what the Hell is the Goal?, while the Reader, for the 89th time wonders "when the Hell is this torment going to be over?"

Or not: see, friends, the heart of The Goal is really nothing more than a thinly-veiled blueprint for the whole Management Consulting industry: fly into Dallas or Topeka or Flint to some hopelessly befuddled old-line company with more staff than brains, bill them a gazillion dollars to do something that Marty the Shop Foreman had been telling them to do for decades, and then shuffle off to the Admiral's Club for a martini and a club sandwich.

When, in fact, the Real Goal should have been: find a corporate raider willing to buy up the dying Operation, sh*t-can the employees, offshore everything to Bangalore, sell the parts for a tidy profit, and retire to a tropical island.

Want a real business lesson? The Goal is to make money, by any means necessary. That means being smarter, more nimble, and more ruthless than the Other Guy. It means, in an operational setting, figuring out who's holding up the Widget Line and ruining his sh*t, with Extreme Prejudice, and then getting back to Making Money. Rinse, repeat.

View anyone who subscribes to The Goal with extreme suspicion: that person is either a tap-dancing bullsh*t artist or a simpleton.

One star given because the book burns well.

JSG


Skip the "business novel and go directly to Six Sigma   March 11, 2003
 31 out of 51 found this review helpful

As noted previously, my review methodology is to read a book, take scattered notes, then give the whole idea some time - often 1-6 months. Working within a large multi-national corporation, I am inundated with "new" ideas almost daily, and want to see if the lessons learned actually made any difference in my professional life. This helps me isolate the key points offered from the stuff.

Six months after completing this book, here's my take-away: find your worst bottleneck and submit resources to alleviating it. This is done because the total throughput of your operation is constrained by this (or these) bottleneck(s). As throughput at this bottleneck improves, and other bottlenecks are exposed, repeat the process. Ad infinitum.

The author calls this the "Theory of Constraints" (TOC), which is shared here:

1.) Identify the system's constraint(s) (i.e., bottlenecks)
2.) Decide how to "exploit" the constraint(s), meaning, how to make the best use of them

3.) Subordinate everything else to the above decision (because they are the bottlenecks)
4.) Elevate the system's constraint(s) (i.e., improve throughput)
5.) Rather, rinse, repeat (i.e., if a constraint appears due to this improvement, repeat the process

There's some discussion about the dangers of improper application of Cost Accounting as a success metric, but the most unique thing about this book is its format: a "business novel." It's business fiction. I'm not kidding. It's a story about this guy and his factory and his wife and kids.

To be completely honest, I found much of this tremendously irritating. I would have preferred committing precious time listening to a condensed version of the story, without having to keep up with the protagonist's marital problems. I have to be crass, but I could care less, although his example of how a line of marching Boy Scouts illustrated the evils of variation. I still can't grasp the value of the numbing details of his marriage problems, and I resent the time wasted when I could have been reading something else.

My advice would be to search the web for quick overviews on the TOC, then skip this book and jump directly to recent works on Lean Six Sigma (see ISBN's 0071385215 and 0793144345 for quick primers). The DMAIC process within this methodology is directly actionable, the ideas presented mirror what's presented within this "novel," without the relationship fluff, and the Six Sigma methodology is directly tied to the bottom line, which in the end is all I really care about.