The Goal: 40th Anniversary Edition: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

When I was first assigned to read this book, I thought it was going to be a purely theoretical material. I thought it was going to be a book difficult to read and/or keep me interested to continue reading. However, this book turned to be a marvelous composition. The reader is always interested in the topic, and one can feel like being part of the plot. This book is a perfect combination of a narrative, and an explanation. The author dedicated the time and effort to make sure that anyone, who grabs this book and reads it, will be able to clearly understand the material presented. As an industrial engineering student, we are focused on improving an existent process and/or system in a facility. Moreover, we are provided with a broad set of techniques that can be utilized in accomplishing this purpose. The Goal by Goldratt is a magnificent piece of literature where industrial engineering student can see how the different techniques learned in class are applied into a real world problem.In The Goal, Goldratt also provides the reader with a description and an example of how to apply the Theory of Constraints. Alex Rogo, a plant engineer at UniCo Manufacturing, is presented with a complex problem; he has several months of orders overdue and his plant is not capable of delivering any order in time. Therefore, Bill Peach, Alex’s boss, tells him that he has only three months to turn his plant around. As a result, Alex and his team start working in finding a solution; however, they are not capable to find it without the help of Jonah, Alex’s Physics professor. Nonetheless, it is important to mention that Jonah does not provide Alex with immediate solutions; instead, he uses the Socratic Method to teach Alex how to be able to localize the bottlenecks and non-bottlenecks of his process and to determine the goal of his plant. Therefore, after spending several days thinking about what the goal is, he is finally able to define it as “Reducing operational expenses and inventory while increasing throughput” (Goldratt 87). Jonah also teaches Alex that in every company there is dependent events and statistical fluctuations that affect the process. According to the Theory of Constraints, one must identify the bottleneck and then work around it; in other words, one must take into account the bottleneck in order to increase throughput and ultimately reach the goal. Jonah, however, after providing Alex with enough help, he takes a step back on his role and forces Alex to learn how to be able to identify the bottlenecks on his own and what approach or process to use to fix the bottlenecks. At the end, Alex finally understands that it is of utmost importance for any individual to be able to answer three questions: “‘what to change?’, ‘what to change to?’, and ‘how to cause a change?’” (Goldratt 337).Overall, The Goal is a magnificent work that I highly recommend to any individual to read in order to understand more about the Theory of Constraints and how to become a better manager. I deeply believe that any individual who reads this book will be greatly benefited from the material presented; in my personal experience, I am pleased that I was able to read this book since I was given the opportunity to add a new technique to my engineering toolbox. I encourage any reader that is uncertain whether or not to buy this book to purchase it. I believe that it is definitely worth the time reading this book; thanks to this book, I feel better prepared as an engineer.

Amazing and perspective altering. A must-read for any business leader or manager. Great story and very engaging as well. Highly recommend.

I am reading this having already read Gene Kim's "The Phoenix Project." As you might expect, I am in IT - so why read this? In short, I think the novel does a fantastic job of introducing the down-sides of "Taylorist" management approaches, even in manufacturing, which is what Taylorism was developed for in the first place. By presenting the material in the form of a novel with a clear narrative path, it presents the basic ideas and some of their most important implications in an easily-digested and enjoyable way. You can then go on and read some of the excellent nonfiction literature on Lean that is targeted at your type of business and start with a intuition about where things can go, making that literature easier to digest and understand. (As an example, I read Reinertson's excellent "Principles of Product Development Flow" before reading this. I understood in an "I can apply these ideas" way about 30% of the work, and kinda-sorta got the rest. AFTER reading this book and seeing a bigger picture, much more of his theory makes sense to me in a way that I can actually use it now.)The book has a few dings against it - mostly simply that it is dated. The deteriorating relationship with his stay-at-home wife is realistic for the time in which the book was written - but it smacks of 1986 now. (This from a guy who got married in 1986...) While it is a bit of a distraction, it does help the book make the point that improving things at work in the right way can and does improve people's outside-of-work lives in very real ways. You will not get that empathetic viewpoint from the nonfiction literature on the subject, so the inclusion is still a strength - it is just that the content has not aged all that well.On the positive side, it swings into other ideas too. The discussion of how traditional accounting rules and consequential financial controls can create a set of counterproductive incentives is telling, and presages by a couple of decades the work being done now in the Beyond Budgeting movement. So it is a great jumping-off point for that too.Both this book and "The Phoenix Project" are pretty easy reads. If you gun through both over a weekend or two you will be able to see how the principles of Lean developed in manufacturing can be applied to other kinds of work.