Customer Reviews

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

5 star:		(121)
4 star:		(49)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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!

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...

First, I would commend Eliyahu M. Goldratt for getting "the Goal" right. In this age of political correctness and "good to the community," this is the only management book that states the goal of businesses is to make money. Bravo!

Secondly, as a process guy, I would recommend this book to anyone who is concerned about how to make processes better. The author does this in a special way, by relating in ongoing improvement in terms of the aforementioned goal. Goldratt's relates his process "theory of constraints" and "bottlenecks" in in a holistic way to the overall running of a business. Again, this is the only place I have seen this idea as well articulated and connected to strategic business goals.

Finally, I would recommend this book since it presents the information in one of the best ways, through a story. If you enjoyed Blanchard's "One Minute Manager," Johnson's "Who Moved My Cheese," or Cox's "Zapp!" this might be a good book for you. I will warn you though, this book is considerably thicker and heavier reading than the above three books. It still makes for an easy read nonetheless!

There is also the side story of Alex Rogo's deteriorating relationship with his wife to keep the story going. Although not critical to the main points of the book, it does make for an interesting read while not bogging down the main idea.

In summary, this is an insightful, interesting book about the real nature of business and improving processes. I definitely recommend it for all the reasons stated above. And, since there is a definite, warm "human side" to the story, it is a book that would count as much toward pleasure reading as it would a serious book about business. A must for the boardroom table as well as the bedside nightstand!

If you are a manager who likes more to read a fiction than a textbook, Goldratt is exactly for you. "The Goal" gives a thorough picture about principles of Theory of Constraints (TOC) in an straightforward format that is easy to read even to a BBA junior student.

The methodology used by Goldratt is something that could be called Aristotelian. The discussions between Jonah and Alex do not provide reader with solutions rather than way of thinking. Quite often reader finds himself thinking on the solutions and finding alternatives even before Alex gets close to them.

Apart from some reviewers, I think that even these managers who are not directly dealing with production management should buy this book. I got some interesting ideas even to improve public sector management in Estonia.

Things to improve: - the novel was probably finalised in a hurry, the end was a little bit tight. The second idea is to give some charts and tables in order to generalise these ideas that were provided into easy-to-grasp overview. Fortunately Goldratt's second book "It's no luck" was far better in that respect.

I've read every book Eli Goldratt has written and am waiting for his newest. This is not a boring business processes book--it is one you will learn from and it is written in a way you will remember it like a good movie. Believe it or not, there are times when you must create a constraint in order to make your business more profitable--even if that means slowing down productivity in some areas while focusing on others. This guy is nuts you say--but this book will make you believe it. I was skeptical at first--but one year later I was speaking at a national convention with six other speakers presenting how we used the knowledge to turn the Titanic. Continuing to use this knowledge lead to corporate awards, to include a close finish for the Vice President Al Gore Award, for making awesome changes and delivering results no one else in the 85 unit company could do--the company CEO said "we were the model". I attribute a majority of the success to "The Goal" and the rest of the credit goes to my supervisors who also read "The Goal". It will change the way you think.

Goldratt's book is a good read and should be a part of all manufacturing managers' reading lists. For a plant manager who finds himself in Rogo's place, it is an excellent prescription for what to do now to save your plant. It does not give you theory, but rather a rough and ready process to work with where the chips meet the floor.

It does not however solve the basic problem in manufacturing which is "How to achieve competitive advantage." Since it is focused on plant level reactive management, it does not focus on strategic issues and as well overlooks the beneficial effects that reengineering to a flow process environment could bring.

The Boy Scout hike game is a very flawed example that will lead readers astray from good principles. In it he attempts to show that because of statistical fluctuations a balanced line is counterproductive. However the example that he uses is in fact not a balanced line as any lean or flow manufacturing student could point out. The line is not make to demand but push, the processes are way out of control (71% variability in process time), there is no flexibility in the line to handle issues, and there is no management of WIP via Kanban or anything else. He also stacks the deck somewhat in the rolls of the dice to make his point. Students of lean principles know that balanced lines are possible w manufacturing using proper principles such a Kanban, demand pull, etc.

If you have a limited amount of time to save your plant, here is a good prescription. If you want to revamp your manufacturing enterprise, you would do better to read "The Quantum Leap"

Sure, this book is targeted to managers in production, but the insights are equally applicable to consultants, bankers, or anyone else who deals with processes in their business routine.

I found this book highly entertaining. I was pulled into the problems facing the title character, and enjoyed the process of working through the answers.

If you like novels which impart a great deal of wisdom, this is a perfect book. It is not dry like many of its counterparts in the business section. Regardless of how applicable you find it to your business, you will not regret the time spent in these pages.

My only complaint is the ending. It seems the author was rushed by the publisher to come to a hasty conclusion. I feel like I just finished part one of a two part book. Where is the smooth ending? The book lost a star for this reason alone.

john.grounds@sirjohnathon.com

I had to read this book as a part of my Integrated Manufacturing and Control Systems in my Industrial Engineering PHD program. The book is great. This book is a must to read for:
1. All Industrial Engineers with management ambitions.
2. Middle and Upper Management
A lot of companies had already given this book to their staff to read. The book is a nice story that you can be read in less than a week (spending couple of hours every night before you go to bed). It is written in a very simple language.
What "The Goal" talks about is a simple and obvious problem: Make Money by starting with eliminating bottlenecks and reducing batch sizes. Unfortunately we are in 2003 right now and lot of companies still measure the performance of their plants based on efficiency and employee utilization and not on how much money they make.
For the old school people to see a worker idle is a disaster in manufacturing but to have him over producing is a good thing, "The Goal" explain why this situation may not be a disaster and may actually be a good thing.
After you finish reading this book if are a middle manager or upper management you should start reading "It's Not Luck",.

Goldratt carefully combines strategy and fiction into his book, The Goal, providing a resource no manufacturing manager should miss. The story follows Alex Rogo as he races to improve profitability at his plant while also saving his rocky marriage. Goldratt employs a unique writing style, weaving the basic concepts of manufacturing strategy directly into the narrative. The Goal is a quick read that both entertains and informs.

How often is a plant manager asked to "improve efficiency" by keeping the assembly line flowing, reducing employee downtime, and increasing inventory stockpiles? Far too often, according to Goldratt, who convincingly proves that `bottleneck' activities are the ultimate constraint in a manufacturing system. Likening bottlenecks to the slowest member of a hiking group, he contends a manufacturing line can only move as fast as its slowest activity - a bottleneck activity. Poor production planning can result in an inventory pileup in front of a bottleneck activity. Activities circumventing the bottleneck cause inventory problems in assembly and are similarly constrained by market demand. The solution is to pull inventory through the bottleneck activities according to this demand, while utilizing non-bottleneck activities as necessary. Idle time at non-bottlenecks is perfectly acceptable.

Goldratt also examines the critical flaw of cost accounting systems - reducing total product costs do not simply correlate to higher profits. In many manufacturing organizations, performance measures are based upon efficiencies and variances, rather than bottom-line impact. Therefore, the goal of management (make more money) is misaligned with that of the front-line worker (increase efficiency).

They are simple, yet often forgotten lessons. What is the GOAL of a business? It is simply to make more money, and any action you take towards that goal is a good decision. Any action taking you away from that goal is a poor decision. Goldratt makes the distinction clear both in a personal and professional context. He concludes his discussion by asking the reader to consider how such action can successfully be implemented across an organization. Without providing a definitive answer, he implores the reader to examine the lessons learned throughout his writing - seek and ye shall find.

One word of warning can be drawn from the narrative - many managers will be tempted to duplicate the examples without regard for the process leading to those conclusions. Many will consider their own organization a "special case" to which these lessons do not apply. Such criticism is clearly unfounded; the true lesson of The Goal is that change is implemented through a process of ongoing improvement specific to each organization. The framework outlined through the narrative is broad, providing the fundamentals necessary to drill down into the core problems plaguing manufacturing profitability.

For successfully authoring an entertaining and informative composition, based upon the Socratic method, Goldratt deserves high praise.

Joshua A. Gerlick