The Goal

a process of ongoing improvement

by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox

408 pages

English language

Published Sept. 9, 2012 by North River Press.

ISBN:: 978-0-88427-195-6
OCLC Number:: 800030326

View on OpenLibrary

View on Inventaire

(35 reviews)

Mr. Rogo, a plant manager, must improve his factory's efficiency or face its closing in just three months. Despite the fictional setting, Goldratt's novel has become a classic business and management text.

Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal is a gripping novel that is transforming management thinking throughout the Western world. The author has been described by Fortune as a ‘guru to industry’ and by Businessweek as a ‘genius’. 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 and 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 colleague from his student days—Jonah—to help him …

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. Eliyahu M. Goldratt was an internationally recognized leader in the development of new business management concepts and systems, and an educator to many of the world’s corporations. The 25th anniversary edition includes Dr. Goldratt’s article, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants,” as well as a series of detailed case study interviews that explore how organizations around the world have been transformed by his ideas.

14 editions

ꞙ𝓲𝕟𝕚𝓉ᶌ reviewed The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Fantastic look at work production processes

5 stars

I shouldn't have hesitated so long in reading this. I'm in management of software production activities, and loved Phoenix and unicorn project, and this is a look at the philosophy that drove those philosophies. After this it is so clear why waterfall software production methods are so problematic. It's counter intuitive, until you look at it from a factory perspective. In waterfall you stack a huge amount of inventory up. Stack stack stack. The first boy scout runs down the trail as far as he can go. Maybe all the way to what he thinks is the end of the hike. Then he sits down and waits. Then the next boy gets to walk the trail, the tester, and you're lucky if you only need one go at this, often you need to have three of these folks, each waiting on the previous to get to the end before they …

Only then do you get the last person to walk the trail. Maybe they've been hearing updates all along, telling you when they thought you were going down the wrong path based on what they were hearing. Maybe their walk is the first time they have any insight into the software, er, the trail. It's only when they walk the trail though that they can tell you it's the right way with certainty. Only when they get to the end can they tell you if you stopped at the right point. And only then do you get to confidently prepare for the next day's hike.

And the software customer is a hiker. No software project is just re creating an existing product. Software production is not a normal production line. You create a new thing once - maybe it's just a new version, but you'll only create that once. A production line creates many many copies of one thing. The customer in a normal production context can evaluate a previously finished product. They can determine if they want what you're making, but want it red instead. With software you can only truly evaluate the output from all steps, and only at the end of the process.

The solution is to shorten the path that the first person is allowed to walk before the last person walks. If the first person can only walk as far as the customer can see, now, then the software developer will produce what the customer wants, then the customer will see the next quarter mile, and the developer will produce that.

This requires rapid cycles of development and testing and production, it gets the customer software regularly and asks for their feedback regularly. It keeps that developer actively walking much more regularly, and almost always in the right direction. And often it gives the user something useful very early.

Then you can start to all walk together. You must rope the first boy to the last, so the developer is walking only as fast as the customer. You must limit the release of material (feature needs, bug fixes) to the rate at which the customer can consume it. That looks like continuous deployment, and regular delivery on some short time table. We see it in some companies as many many deployments per day. In my org that is not a good regular end state, but our processes should allow for deployments within hours for emergent situations. And perhaps when you can do that in emergent situations you should just be able to do that any time.

flashy reviewed The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Review of 'The Goal' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Great book. Many important production concepts explained in an interesting and fun way. Held my interest all the way through. As a fiction book it’s far from perfect, but this is after all a business book.

Michael’s At Disney reviewed The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Really good out of the box thinking

5 stars

I'm a softwares engineer, and this book talks about factory management in the 1980s, but it was a suggestion by my VP so I listened to the audiobook none-the-less.

I was really surprised at how engaging it was, and felt the advice and ideas that it provides slipping into my personal and professional life.

Deuce reviewed The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Review of 'The Goal' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Superb!
And I was sure Gene Kim's Phoenix was original.
Well, if you liked it - you will definitely find The Goal very thought-provoking without cheesy scrum examples.
I liked it a lot; it reads like a novel with some serious call in there - done with a goal in mind, every enterprise has a chance to succeed with new & ongoing initiatives.

I haven't read a compelling management book in years; I think the last one was written by Lacoca on his career. Other than that it is difficult to find something useful these days.

Nik Reads Books reviewed The goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

An interesting way to present business principles, but an uninteresting novel in its own right

2 stars

This is a business book in the form of a novel. A middle-manager at a plan manufacturing goods of unknown sort (never named widgets, but may as well be) finds himself on a journey to revolutionize plant management based on the guidance of a Mr. Miyagi-like academic. In doing so, he also saves his marriage and rises to corporate success.

Ultimately, it is a parable about Toyota's revolutionary manufacturing processes, and the appendix of the book breaks this down into a more concise fashion than the rambling novelization.

The underlying principles are sound, however, and the concept of breaking down manufacturing into simple core processes rather than abstract KPIs is sound.

An innovative way to present business principles, maybe, but not a page turner. Would likely be more interesting for business majors than experienced business people.

Sankara reviewed The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Review of 'The Goal' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Just want to say it was a gripping read. A rare thing to say about a business/management book. I’m almost never interested in the facts spitted out in most books - even science books. Tell me how you arrived at that.

Of all the things I could learn from this book, I learnt for the first time in my life the periodic nature of the periodic table. It clicked because the author was inquisitive - “how do we find order from seemingly random things?” And the quest for “intrinsic order”.

The dialog/conversational way of delivering a concept - the Socratic way - is long and winding for some people but information sticks. Precisely because the information isn’t provided in a platter. Allegories and analogies when done right helps you understand a concept quite well and I think this book did it quite well.

kf6gpe reviewed The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Review of 'The Goal' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Can't believe I didn't encounter this book before. The approach --- fictionalized --- was both refreshing and annoying for a business book. Written some time ago, its focus on manufacturing and techniques make it both interesting and challenging to read when coming to it from a post-industrial software industry. But I think there are some valuable takeways in his model --- some of which, alas, had to be rediscovered the hard way by the software industry. And the general approach he champions is a good analytical technique in general for looking at any business process.

GeekWisdom reviewed The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Review of 'The Goal' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Eli Goldratt & Jeff Cox brings to the business world, what Albert Einstein brought to Physics. In his book the character of Alex learns about the Theory of Constraints from his mentor 'Jonah'. Through a series of events (and stresses) in Alex's life, he carefully examines the ongoing processes within the fictional company of Unico and to what extent these processes meet 'The Goal'.

This was my first business novel, and it is what lead me to many other business novels down the road..sort of the 'gateway drug' of the business novel.

You can read more at blog.geekwisdom.org/p/book-notes-goal-process-of-ongoing.html