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91 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Making Informed Decisions, December 16, 1999
This review is from: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement (Paperback)
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.
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131 of 139 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Remarkably Effective Novel for Learning Management, December 7, 2000
This review is from: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement (Paperback)
This novel succeeds in being outstanding at so many levels that it could receive a multiple of five stars. It is hard to imagine a management book in novel form ever approaching this one in usefulness. Most people will learn more that they can apply from this book about management than many people learn to apply from an M.B.A. 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!
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A 150-page text squeezed into a 300-page novel., September 28, 2002
This review is from: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement (Paperback)
In "The Goal," Eliyahu Goldratt has written what has to be one of the most-read business books in existance. It's an introduction to his "Theory of Constraints" (TOC), but it's presented in a radically different form than the traditional business book. Most business books are either substantial, yet dry, text books or more engaging, but less substantive, anecdote-filled treatises. "The Goal" is a novel. About a Plant Manager. Who learns about the Theory of Constraints. While saving his plant. Sounds electrifying, huh? My first reaction when I heard about it was: "A novel about a plant manager? And people actually paid money and read this?" Part of me wanted to read it for the sheer novelty of it. And part of me was interested in some of the buzz I'd heard about TOC. And here's the weird part; the book actually works. It's engaging, particularly if you've ever worked in or around a plant (and know how intimately your personal success is tied to the success of nebulous factors that no one seems to understand). It gradually introduces you to the concepts of TOC in a way that gives you a decent handle on them without mining them to the point of mind-numbing boredom. What is TOC? Well, without re-writing the book here, it's about changing the focus of the organization to understand that the overall flow of work is more important to the success of the organization than the contribution of single parts. That is, managing the manufacturing capacity of the process is more important than ensuring that each manufacturing machine is producing at optimal capacity. In this sense, it's a lot like mathematical optimization, but TOC presents this in a fashion that's much more intuitive (it almost kills me to say that, as I spent a lot of my life gathering math degrees). If you're interested, Goldratt explains all of this in a much shorter book, The Theory of Constraints; however, it's much less interesting than The Goal. And as it basically covers the same information, I'd recommend The Goal before The Theory of Constraints. There are no explosions. No one dies, and there are no conspiracies. At the end of the story, the hero (Alex Roge) doesn't end up in a nail-biting shootout with the enemy (although that might be a nice touch). It's a simple manufacturing plant in a company town that's doomed to extinction (the town and the plant), if things don't improve and improve quickly. And you find yourself pulling for Alex and his team as they honestly try to save the company and the town. As a novelist, Goldratt will certainly never be mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway or Steinbeck. But don't sell the book short; it communicates a fundamentally different business point of view in a quick and effective fashion. And it does it in a way that has the reader anticipating the next development, rather than having to force themselves to slog from chapter to chapter. In the end, I'm glad I read it, and I recommend it highly. Now if he could just turn Alex into an action hero for the sequel...
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