Amazon.com: The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition (Audible Audio Edition): Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox, uncredited, a division of Recorded Books HighBridge: Books
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition Audible – Unabridged
Eliyahu M. Goldratt (Author), Jeff Cox (Author), & 2 more
4.5 out of 5 stars 672 customer reviews
----
Top Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 starsConcepts from The Goal
By Ted Kantrow on February 21, 2005
Format: Paperback
The author of this business novel thinks he's the Messiah. The gist of the 384-page book could have been expressed in a page, and some of it is obvious. But it may be useful anyway, and it's an entertaining read.
His schtick is that one can achieve great gains by identifying the bottlenecks ('constraints') that are blocking improved performance toward your goal, and then doing anything necessary to unblock those constraints - even if this means inefficiently using other non-bottleneck resources.
He says that one should think of the cost of each resource as including its effect on the whole system. So if a machine costs $1K/month to operate, but its rate of production is preventing the business from accepting or fulfilling extra orders that would represent $10K/month in profits, then the true cost of the machine is $11K.
It follows that anything one can do to remove that bottleneck would be worthwhile, provided it adds less than the amount saved to the cost and doesn't introduce a new bottleneck. It's fine if you have to overpay for other resources or use them inefficiently as long as you accomplish this.
It then becomes a matter of analyzing and brainstorming all the ways that bottleneck can be reduced. For instance:
- Can extra capacity be added, even if it is less efficient or uses antiquated equipment or is outsourced to a vendor?
- Can you prioritize the use of the bottlenecked resource so that high-profit and time-sensitive work comes first?
- Can you divert work that doesn't need to go through the bottleneck, even if it would then go through another more cumbersome process?
- Can you prevent work from reaching the bottleneck if Quality Control will eventually reject it?
- Can you increase the rate of output of the bottleneck resource by doubling up batches?
This logic applies regardless of the nature of the bottleneck - whether it relates to a machine (production capacity), marketing effort (how much business is coming in), or any other element of one's environment.
To help identify the bottlenecks and judge tradeoffs, one should identify one's goal as a measure (in a business context this is generally profits or ROI), then identify the factors that influence that measurement and create an equation. For instance,
Profits = Sales - Cost of Inputs - Cost of Transforming Inputs
or,
Return On Investment = (Sales - Cost of Inputs - Cost of Transforming Inputs) / Money Trapped In Unfinished Goods And Inventory
Essentially, his thesis is that by focusing on these bottlenecks, and analyzing and brainstorming their solutions, one takes advantage of the 80/20 rule by prioritizing those few factors that most greatly impact one's performance.
The most rewarding part of the book are the examples in the Testimonials section at the end. The testimonials describe creative solutions to tough bottleneck situations. The book doesn't help the reader come up with this type of creative solution - it only mentions where to look for the problem. Here are the memorable examples he cites:
1. A large office supply company (similar to Staples) was losing business to companies that were charging very low prices. Investigating this marketing bottleneck, they determined that from the customers' perspective, the larger problem was the overall cost of stocking and procuring and purchasing and tracking the office supplies.
Rather than competing on price, its owner fixed the Sales bottleneck with an innovative concept, where they arranged to place fully stocked cabinets filled with office supplies throughout their client companies, just like a hotel minibar. They'd visit each week, restock any items that were used, and charge the company for the items that were removed, thereby saving the company the aggravation and cost of even having to purchase or account for office supplies. They also supplied each customer with detailed information regarding what was used, when. In exchange for this unique convenience, they charged higher prices and achieved large profit margins.
2. A printing company, constrained by the number of presses available to print jobs, made more efficient use of its presses by routing jobs to different types of presses in a way that would maximize the total output of the presses.
3. A manufacturing company's output was limited by a saw that cut pipes. They dug up an old, inefficient saw, put it to work to remove that bottleneck, and increased output and profits significantly.
4. In the book itself, the protagonist's factory increased its Return On Investment (profit/money tied up) by shortening the time it took for a product to be manufactured (as doing that reduced the money tied up, hence increased ROI). This was accomplished by removing delays that were keeping costly unfinished products sitting around the plant. For instance, by reducing the 'batch size', a product would wait less time for its batch to be complete, allowing it to move to the -----
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good for Beginners, Outdated
By Coghan on April 8, 2011
Format: Paperback
If you were stuck in a production environment gone horribly wrong, and you had no clue at all how to begin fixing it, this might give you some ideas to think about. But if you are that lost, why would you be managing a huge production operation to begin with. It isn't that the ideas are bad ones, but they do have limited application. Also, I would definitely say some of these theories have been improved on greatly in the 20 some years since the book was written.
The sub-story of the author's marriage gone horribly wrong is just sad. He apparently knew as little about marriage as he did about managing a production operation. The wife's confession that she just wanted to go shopping and have a nice house and nice things and nice kiddies with a doting husband... well... gag.
With that said, it must be extremely hard to write a business book that comes off like a novel (albeit a cheesy one). It wasn't as much of a snoozer as most of these mandatory reading assigments we get from management. And there is nothing inherently wrong with the info. It's just a bit simplistic. There are much better resources for teaching constraints, socratic method, and six sigma. But if you need the basics and you need them fast, this is a reasonable book to get.
------
3.0 out of 5 stars
Strong Foundation, Weak Structure
By J. Edgar Mihelic on March 22, 2015
Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
I haven't read that many business books. The ones I have are usually more poorly written than the economics books I read. I know that there is often a dedicated course in business writing in the academy, but in my experience, it isn't a focus of the program.
So when I was assigned a long business book as additional reading for my operations management class, I wasn't too jazzed. I was pleasantly surprised though, the Goal isn't that bad.
To talk about the Goal, I have to talk about the structure. It is a 330-page business novel. I had no sense on going in what a business novel would be like, and it is basically that, a novel with plot and characters.
The problem is that it is a didactic novel. That means it is teaching you something. And in that role, it is often very heavy handed. The plot is that Alex, the main character who we get to enjoy present tense first person narration though, has been promoted to be the plant manager of his hometown plant. It is not producing the profits that corporate would like to see. On top of that, the orders are late and they're always in a rush. So corporate comes down and gives Alex an ultimatum that you have three months to turn around the plant or we will look into closing it.
So what does Alex do? Thankfully, Alex meets an old physics teacher friend of his named Jonah, who happens to be an internationally famous business consultant. The problem here is that Jonah is always busy, so he can't handhold Alex to improve the plant. This device is here so that you as the reader and the character of Alex isn't told straight up what changes to make. You/Alex need to find from the stated principles to improve the plant. The whole thing is based on the idea of the Socratic dialogue where the teacher doesn't tell you anything but the educate is a coming to knowledge of the student. It's really heavy-handed, since the author mentions it in the introduction and also has a subplot where Alex's wife starts reading philosophy and they have a couple dialogue exposition-dump conversations.
Ultimately, Alex does come up with a process of improvement where he takes some of the old rules off the board and looks at defining the ultimate goal of the plant vis a vis the company and what he can do to help the plant meet those goals. He and his team identify bottlenecks in the plant, reimagine them, and the plant is a success. He is promoted to district manager at the end, and he and his team start to see how they could apply the more general principles they had determined to processes that are harder to define than movement of material in a plant. For me, the end was the weakest part because I work in service and I kept trying to figure out how this could apply to me in my job. I still haven't and I hope there was a sequel or something that applies the goal to a larger organization.
The general processes that Alex worked out by way of Jonah (who is a total stand-in for the author) are:
1) Identify the system's constraints
2) Decide how to exploit the system's constraints.
3) Subordinate everything else to the above decisions
4) Elevate the system's constraints
5) If in the previous steps, a constraint has been broken, go back to step 1, but do not allow inertia to cause a system constraint.
They sound like good general principles, and they work in the book. I do have some issues with the book and the idea though. First of all, the structure of the book feels entirely unnecessary. We as the reader have very little context for what the company Alex works for even makes. It is just some generalized manufacturing plant in a nameless town. That means the process described in the book cannot be fully trusted to have worked. I would like to see evidence-based material to prove that the process works. As it, it might as well be like the mystery writer who cannot really solve mysteries but just knows what he wants at the end so he can work backwards.
Second, the novel approach is just weird. It makes the book longer by three times than it could be to convey the same information. For example, there is a part in the book where the main character takes his son on a walk in the woods with the rest of the Boy Scout troop. The whole thing is just in there to illustrate that any process is only as strong as its weakest link or as fast as its slowest part. And it takes a long time to do so. The characters never really develop a secondary consideration. There's a whole subplot where Alex and his wife are fighting and she ends up moving out for a while and it is just ridiculous. As a reader of fiction, it is horrible. You don't know why these characters are in love in the first place and their reconciliation is unbelievable. It is also completely unnecessary for what Goldratt is trying to teach in his book. It just adds pages and I still never really cared about the characters.
Smaller things nagged as well. For example, what is it about the impetus to restructure the company? Do you need to be close to failure to rethink your processes? Alex only went ahead with it because he had nothing to lose. That gave him reason to change. If things are working well enough at work, why change, even if efficiencies can be found? Another is that this book has been around a while now. Are efficiencies still possible? Or does every generation of managers have to relearn the same general principle here? Further with the decline of manufacturing in the states to more labor-intensive countries, did the companies that embraced the goal succeed? There's no indication in the book of the real world, so that bugged me.
One last thing. Alex always refers to the cars he and his wife owns by their make. He has a Mazda, and she has an Accord. If he works in domestic manufacturing, why the heck does his family have two foreign cars?
Comment One person found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
Yes
No
Report abuse
3.0 out of 5 starsDecent Business Book, Horrible Novel
By An Amazon Customer on February 12, 2015
Format: Audible Audio Edition
From the perspective of reviewing a novel:
Not good. Two stars tops.
The main character is incredibly unlikeable, alienating his wife and children, blowing off meetings, and leaving work with no explanation for hours at a time. He supposedly is capable enough that he was promoted to plant manager, but he has no idea what's going on from day to day at his home or plant. He gets drunk after work with a female coworker, has her drive him home, "accidentally" falls and drags her on top of him, and then when his wife (who has been waiting for him for hours with no news of a his whereabouts) sees them and gets angry, he feels wronged. When he takes his son for a Scouting hike, he spends the whole time thinking about the plant and not interacting with the kids, except as relates to his job. He named all his plant bottlenecks Herbie after the slower, pudgy Scout on the hike. I could go on. And on.
In a painfully obvious case of Marty Stumanship, Goldratt writes himself into the book as Jonah, a jet-setting Israeli genius who gets paid phenomenal rates to bless manufacturers with his gems of wisdom. Most of the characters are two-dimensional talking heads with acute tendencies toward info dumping. No kidding, one of the character's names is Bob. I lost count of the number of times I saw the phrase "As you know, Bob...." The storyline is patchy and inconsistent, the characters' motivations are hard to understand, and the story's conclusion is abrupt and doesn't wrap up most of the plot threads.
From the perspective of reviewing a business book:
Four stars. I liked Goldratt's ideas. The common sense approach to processes was refreshing . In spite of how bad it made the main character look, my favorite part of the book was the Scout hike. It extracted the process concepts from complex environment of a manufacturing plant and put them into simple terms that made sense to me.
I think he chose to write the book as a novel because he could pad the content. It probably should have been a pamphlet. If you'd like to get the gist of the useful content, I suggest reading his article "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants." It's available free online and contains all the useful bits from the book, plus external sources and a case study.
----
Spirituality, Mind-Body, Gender, Ecology, Ageing, Peace, Scrapbook (in English and Korean)
