The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement 3rd Edition, Goldratt

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement 3rd revised edition by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox includes case study interviews. Professional readers recreate interviews that David Whitford, Editor at Large with Fortune Small Business, conducts with the author Eli Goldratt and with business professionals from General Motors, Thomson-Shore, Security Federal Banks and others who put the principles of The Goal into action.

Alex Rogo is the manager of a failing manufacturing plant who receives an ultimatum from corporate headquarters: Turn the situation around in three months or the plant will be scrapped. With help from a mysterious mentor, Rogo discovers a revolutionary new way to do business—a way for people in any field of endeavor to increase productivity, profitability, and personal fulfillment.

A business book disguised as a novel, a love story about the manufacturing process, and an exhilarating adventure in human potential, The Goal is changing how America does business. First published in 1984, it became an underground bestseller; today it's used by thousands of companies and taught in hundreds of business schools. It also includes the author's personal story, "My Saga."

Authors balance between the need to jazz up the dry business content and the temptation to succumb to the story's melodrama. The heroic story line seems hindered by extraneous dialogue and subplots, but the voice performances make the production hard to fault as a listening experience. The main point is that companies are profitable when archaic habits are persistently reexamined with fresh eyes for constraints and bottlenecks.

This book is an attempt to show that we can postulate a very small number of assumptions and utilize them to explain a very large spectrum of industrial phenomena. You the reader can judge whether or not the logic of the book's derivation from its assumptions to the phenomena we see daily in our plants is so flawless that you call it common sense. Incidentally, common sense is not so common and is the highest praise we give to a chain of logical conclusions.

If you do, you basically have taken science from the ivory tower of academia and put it where it belongs, within the reach of every one of us and made it applicable to what we see around us. Authors have attempted to show with this book is that no exceptional brain power is needed to construct a new science or to expand on an existing one. What is needed is just the courage to face inconsistencies and to avoid running away from them just because "that's the way it was always done".

Authors dared to interweave into the book a family life struggle, which I assume is quite familiar to any manager who is to some extent obsessed with his work. This was not done just to make the book more popular, but to highlight the fact that we tend to disqualify many phenomena of nature as irrelevant as far as science is concerned.

More details about this book...

Posted in: Operations