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Summary: WOW!!! A Must-Read For All Operations Management Folks!
Review: Eli Goldratt demonstrates his genius both as a thinker and as a teacher with THE GOAL. The operational concepts that he presents are revolutionary in their practicality and common-sense approach. These concepts, collectively described as Theory of Constraints (TOC), have closed the loop for me on operational thinking and problem solving that has spanned my career. We are taught, first as department heads, and then as general managers to focus on "productivity" in each area independently and "fix" each area in isolation of the other departments. TQM and JIT began a revolutionary change in this thinking that linked the departments into chains and emphasized up-stream "suppliers" and down-stream "customers." Where these fell short was in looking at the productivity of the entire "chain" and providing a problem solving method for continuously improving that productivity. TOC provides a problem solving method as well as a management approach that drives ongoing improvement in any business. The business novel approach is very appealing as a delivery and teaching method. Most of us struggle through the annual crop of dry business texts that are generally uninspiring. This book is presented with a storyteller's passion for detail, while still driving the key learning points of the theory. This makes sticking with it to the end much easier, which is important, as several key concepts are not revealed until the final pages. Every organization can benefit from the concepts presented in THE GOAL. Implementation is not costly, unlike some other improvement "fads." TOC shows you, the manager, how to focus on what is really important in your operation, in spite of your daily fire drills.
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Summary: The goal is about the objective of any company: Making Money
Review: 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",.
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Summary: Should be more business novels like this
Review: I think there should be more business novels that wrap a fictional story around management techniques and facts to teach the next generation of business managers. I hope this book inspires others to write a story. This book I think should definitely be required reading for anyone interested in a manufacturing job and it can easily be applied to the service industry.
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Summary: Skip the "business novel and go directly to Six Sigma
Review: As noted previously, my review methodology is to read a book, take scattered notes, then give the whole idea some time - often 1-6 months. Working within a large multi-national corporation, I am inundated with "new" ideas almost daily, and want to see if the lessons learned actually made any difference in my professional life. This helps me isolate the key points offered from the stuff. Six months after completing this book, here's my take-away: find your worst bottleneck and submit resources to alleviating it. This is done because the total throughput of your operation is constrained by this (or these) bottleneck(s). As throughput at this bottleneck improves, and other bottlenecks are exposed, repeat the process. Ad infinitum. The author calls this the "Theory of Constraints" (TOC), which is shared here: 1.) Identify the system's constraint(s) (i.e., bottlenecks)
2.) Decide how to "exploit" the constraint(s), meaning, how to make the best use of them 3.) Subordinate everything else to the above decision (because they are the bottlenecks)
4.) Elevate the system's constraint(s) (i.e., improve throughput)
5.) Rather, rinse, repeat (i.e., if a constraint appears due to this improvement, repeat the process There's some discussion about the dangers of improper application of Cost Accounting as a success metric, but the most unique thing about this book is its format: a "business novel." It's business fiction. I'm not kidding. It's a story about this guy and his factory and his wife and kids. To be completely honest, I found much of this tremendously irritating. I would have preferred committing precious time listening to a condensed version of the story, without having to keep up with the protagonist's marital problems. I have to be crass, but I could care less, although his example of how a line of marching Boy Scouts illustrated the evils of variation. I still can't grasp the value of the numbing details of his marriage problems, and I resent the time wasted when I could have been reading something else. My advice would be to search the web for quick overviews on the TOC, then skip this book and jump directly to recent works on Lean Six Sigma (see ISBN's 0071385215 and 0793144345 for quick primers). The DMAIC process within this methodology is directly actionable, the ideas presented mirror what's presented within this "novel," without the relationship fluff, and the Six Sigma methodology is directly tied to the bottom line, which in the end is all I really care about.
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Summary: A must for every CEO, esp. in production management
Review: 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.
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Summary: Easy read, but tends to drag at end
Review: Straight forward & easy to follow reading. The Theory Of Constraints portion was a bit dumbed down and a the romance thread was a little tiresome, but all in all it was a decent read. The last 50 pages are a complete bore...just kept dragging along so I suggest you close the book once you think the hero has saved the town - you won't miss a thing.
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Summary: The Best Introduction to Operation Management
Review: "Common sense is not so common." -- Voltaire The beauty of this work is that it is able to distill complex but dry operational management issues and transform them into easy to follow conceptual framework that is both enlightening and entertaining. The solutions to the problems are stated in plain language that appear almost like common sense, but "common sense is not so common." This book is a must-read for operation consultants, VCs, and restructuring artists.
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Summary: Very Informative and Enlightening
Review: Goldratt does a great job of putting together a fable that intertwines concrete lessons for managing a production operation with a story featuring interesting characters. However, while the book focuses on production operations, the techniques in his book may also be effective in resolving service oriented processes as well. The key point to Goldratt's theory of constraints is the identification and dissolution of bottlenecks (constraints) in the system. However, lest you think this all there is to it, Goldratt goes into detail describing how to identify the constraint, how it impacts production, quality, and costs of operations. The book is well worth reading, and seems to suggest a Deming management method whereby the manager should constantly strive to improve quality, processes, and people management. I would recommend the serious reader also read Mary Walton's The Deming Management Method in addition to this book. A similar book, worth reading in my opinion, that deals with the formation of teams to resolve constraints: The Five Dysfunctions of Teams (ISBN: 0787960756).
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Summary: A Must Read for Managers and Engineers
Review: Every manager and engineer should be required to read this book. The concepts really aren't new, but the level of focus is the real change. Currently most managers try to do things similar to what is presented, but get lead astray by conflicting theories, metrics, and company policies. TOC cuts through the conflicts to present what is truely important and what is just a distraction from real improvement. This is still the place to start if you want to understand TOC.
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Summary: The process is the thing.
Review: This book is written as one person's personal journey of discovery. It is a fast paced novel, almost a thriller, which dramatically demonstrates the power of modern management in the setting of saving a factory that is rapidly heading for disaster. I recommend this book to people in industry who have to deal with manufacturing and quality assurance and to anybody who wants to understand the continuous improvement paradigm for running a business. The book is a pretty fine read in its own right as a novel and it is especially relevant to anyone who wants to improve an operation such as an assembly line or manufacturing plant. As usual here is a quote from the book however this has been edited down a bit from the original to better illustrate the point: "Who is going to set up the other machines in t he bottleneck area?" he asks. "We will pull helpers who know enough to set up their own equipment from non-bottleneck machines" "Well I guess we can try it," says Bob. "But what happens if stealing people turns non-bottlenecks into new bottlenecks?" I tell him, "The important thing is to maintain flow. If we take a worker away, and we can't maintain flow, then we'll put the worker back and steal a body from someplace else."
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