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Eliyahu M. Goldratt

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition Paperback – June 1, 2012

by Eliyahu M. Goldratt (Author)

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*A Graphic Novel version of this title is now available: "The Goal: A Business Graphic Novel"

30th Anniversary Edition. Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal, a gripping novel, is transforming management thinking throughout the world. It is a book to recommend to your friends in industry - even to your bosses - but not to your competitors. Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant - or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a professor from student days - Jonah - to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done. The story of Alex's fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas, which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC), developed by Eli Goldratt.

One of Eli Goldratt s convictions was that the goal of an individual or an organization should not be defined in absolute terms. A good definition of a goal is one that sets us on a path of ongoing improvement.
Pursuing such a goal necessitates more than one breakthrough. In fact it requires many. To be in a position to identify these breakthroughs we should have a deep understanding of the underlying rules of our environment. Twenty-five years after writing The Goal, Dr. Goldratt wrote Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. In this article he provided the underlying rules of operations. This article appears at the end of this book.

Like Mrs. Fields and her cookies,The Goal was too tasty to remain obscure. Companies began buying big batches and management schools included it in their curriculums. Fortune Magazine

A survey of the reading habits of managers found that though they buy books by the likes of Tom Peters for display purposes, the one management book they have actually read from cover to cover is The Goal. The Economist

"Goal readers are now doing the best work of their lives. Success Magazine

A factory may be an unlikely setting for a novel, but the book has been wildly effective.: Tom Peters

Required reading for Amazon's Management.

Print length

362 pages
Language

English
Publisher

North River Press
Publication date

June 1, 2012
Dimensions

8.9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
ISBN-10

9780884271956
ISBN-13

978-0884271956
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A survey of the reading habits of managers found that though they buy books by the likes of Tom Peters for display purposes, the one management book they have actually read from cover to cover is The Goal." -- The Economist
"Anybody who considers himself a manager should rush out, buy and devour this book immediately. If you are the only one in your place to have read it, your progress along the path to the top may suddenly accelerate...one of the most outstanding business books I have ever encountered." --Punch Magazine

"Like Mrs. Fields and her cookies, The Goal was too tasty to remain obscure. Companies began buying big batches and management schools included it in their curriculums." --Fortune Magazine

"This theory provided a persuasive solution for factories struggling with production delays and low revenues." --Harvard Business Review

About the Author

Eliyahu M. Goldratt is an internationally recognized leader in the development of new business management concepts and systems, and acts as an educator to many of the world's corporations.

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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0884271951
Publisher ‏ : ‎ North River Press; 3rd edition (June 1, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 362 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780884271956
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0884271956
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.9 x 6 x 1.1 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,278 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Market Research Business (Books)
- #2 in Business Operations Research (Books)
- #3 in Production & Operations

Customer Reviews:
3,341 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		76%
4 star		15%
3 star		5%
2 star		1%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Jack ReaderTop Contributor: Chess

Rewarding and thought provoking

Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2018

Verified Purchase

It is interesting that I already had this book in my hands three times and realizing that it was about manufacturing I just kept putting it back on the shelves of bookstores. What could be interesting or relevant from a book about a manufacturing plant that I could apply to my own interest that is healthcare management? But then a consultant came to help us and when I asked him about his most favorite books, he recommended this one. So fourth time is a charm, I finally bought it on Amazon. It was a most pleasant surprise. Discovering that the one and only Goal of any business is making money and this could only be achieved by a smooth Flow of the production and our most important management task is to prevent any resistance slowing it was eye opening. It is ironic that main character Rogo's competitor, Smyth seems to be a fanatic of various metrics and data while ignoring commonsense approach that mysterious mentor Jonah dispenses or induces intermittently. It is also ironic that I see an all too familiar approach of a local hospital in healthcare delivery. Management here seems to be mesmerized by metrics while ignoring a more commonsense and human-centered approach. Yes, they are fascinated with speed, but fast does not necessarily equates harmonic and quality flow. It would have been so great if Goldratt had a chance to provide his insights into healthcare! Closest he got to this is possibly his book about retail, "Isn't It Obvious?". In any case I am moving on to his book "The Choice" with great anticipation.

28 people found this helpful

Helpful

Mason H.

One of the Most Dull and Non-Relatable Books Ever Written

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2021

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I imagine that this book has only sold "Over 6 Million Copies!" as advertised on the cover due to unfortunate students needing it for required reading. Incredibly dull despite the hamfisted attempts at exciting the reader with inconsequential drivel and entwining a dry story about a factory of unknown production (they give it the name "Unico" and don't divulge any info on the product produced in an attempt to make it universally applicable) with a clumsy story about a boring workaholic and his needy wife and their generic children.

Each painful turning of the page had me wondering if this is how a past-his-prime boomer in a dead-end manufacturing management position sees his life right before his industry is rendered fully obsolete and he is forced into retirement.

I've read a lot of incredibly boring things in my pursuit of my MBA but I felt strongly enough about how bad this story was to log onto Amazon immediately after the last page to voice my dissatisfaction and resentment of the precious moments of my life wasted on this book. It was undoubtedly one of the least pleasant reading experiences I've ever had. If you are an instructor, please do your students a favor and have them read a summary instead of the actual book, and if you are reading this for yourself, I only have one question: why? 1/10, would not read again.

11 people found this helpful

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Laird

Still a compelling place to start learning about Lean.

Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2018

Verified Purchase

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.

38 people found this helpful

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J Andrews

One of my top 5 business books. Immediately applicable to nearly every business.

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2017

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This is one of the best business books I’ve ever read. Definitely in my top 5 along with Good to Great, The Leadership Challenge, Visioneering and Crossing the Chasm. If you do anything in manufacturing, distribution, production, supply chain management or are trying to improve operations, READ THIS BOOK! You won’t regret it. It’s applicable the minute you finish it. And because of the way it’s written, you won’t forget the primary points of he book.

18 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

RobCH

Seminal book by one of the few truly original thinkers on management

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 15, 2020

Verified Purchase

I originally bought this book in the 1990s by chance at an airport in the US. It is Goldratt's utterly compelling, though occasionally rather clunky, introduction to his Theory of Constraints in the unusual form of a business novel, in which the hero is given the (apparently) impossible task of turning around his loss-making production plant or face closure. At the heart of the solution is the need to step back from conventional business wisdom - cost-accounting and local optima - and analyse/manage any organisation as one interconnected and inter-dependent system. Sounds obvious, but a quick look at how an individual's performance is measured in your own company will very likely show it's still not happening. The lessons of The Goal are applicable not just in production but in all kinds of business (my own at the time being cultural non-profits), and Goldratt's theory of constraints was fleshed out in subsequent novels to include the disciplines of marketing and project management. If TOC is unfamiliar, this book is a must-read.

3 people found this helpful

Steven

The inspiration for David Anderson's Kanban Method for software and service delivery.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 8, 2017

Verified Purchase

This book is an insightful and enjoyable read. The story will ring true to anyone working in a process that encourages starting an overwhelming quantity of work as deadlines become ever harder to hit.

This third edition finishes with an essay by Eli Goldratt that compares Lean, TPS and "Drum Buffer Rope" as different applications of the same core Lean concepts.

I read the Goal from the perspective of leading change in a service delivery department, where I've used the Kanban Method to guide improvements to our delivery. The goal was the initial inspiration for David Anderson's book Kanban for Successful Evolutionary Change, and it was interesting to read from that perspective.

4 people found this helpful

VikoJ

Great book but needs a refresh

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 25, 2019

Verified Purchase

It’s a great fable and helps you get the big point of managing flow and throughout end to end.

I think the book would benefit from a refresh with more illustrations to get the points across more clearly to make it an easier read.

Vincent Hudner

Very informative book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 28, 2021

Verified Purchase

Putting the information into readable story is great, and to see the improvements and the difficulties as they unfold aids the understanding greatly. The improvements when they came seemed unbelievable, and while the well know Toyota improvements is a great example I'd like to see more modern day examples in new industries.

Kindle Customer

An eyeopener

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 18, 2020

Verified Purchase

Clearly and effectively explains and demonstrates the need for a more logical approach. Will certainly be using these techniques in futurw