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Summary: A Process of Ongoing Improvment in Business and Life!
Review: After picking up The Goal I was impressed with the way it was written. Reading a business book in a narrative format was something I did not expect to see. The narrative format helped to grab my attention and keeping it through the book. It is no wonder that is has sold over a million copies. I have since recommended this book to both family and friends not just as a book about business but it can help in every aspect of life. My manager friends who have started the book say that the approach to keep it away from the traditional business snooze books is great. I loved the fact that he was able to let the reader figure out what Jonah (an oracle like figure) meant before Alex got it. I felt it did take Alex a long time to understand and it did seem there was some basic changes in his plant that the untrained eye could see but over all I have nothing but praise for this book. If it weren't for the fact that Jonah did arrive at the plant it could have almost been thought of that Jonah was the subconscious of Alex Rogo and he had the answers all along. I felt that The Goal did a great job leaving an open ended question, showing that yes, indeed life is a process of on going improvement.
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Summary: 20 years and still...
Review: I read the book without knowing that it is 20 years old. Interesting that the situation in most companies is still the same... late shipping dates, bottlenecks etc....
Since in my company most of the keywords are hourly used and presented as the whole idea to get rid of the mis-situation, and I actually found that most of the theories are known and applied.... my conclusion is: there must be something else, why things cannot be that easy: propably: customer satisfaction, competition and quality improvement. The book is obviously just one part of an answer. And it definitely needs some updating.... and a better writer. The story is average, the writing really cheap.
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Summary: A reminder to use common sense
Review: The book was a required reading in business school for us. The central concept is that bottlenecks (and near bottlenecks) determine the throughput of the manufacturing process. It also shows how accounting can blur the picture of what is going on at a manufacturing plant. The book's story-telling style was a nice relief when other required readings are often dry and impersonal. Sometimes the story slows down and drags a bit too much for my taste, but overall, due to the importance of the message in it, I recommend the book.
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Summary: The Goal: It's money stupid!
Review: What I like about , "The Goal", is demolishes the traps that all Western, and especially American manufacturers are in. We are slaves to an undeserving god, old style accounting that is putting us out of business. These false gods, are blinding us to the real faith of how good we might become.
Professor Goldratt using science to examine with emperical clarity what the process of manufacturing is. Using mathamatics, not accounting principles, whatever they are, Dr. Goldratt in a novel format takes us through the world of a plant manager, who could be anyone of us, and using the socratic method, unfolds the solutions to many barriers caused by false metrics to see how to really make money and run a world class factory. Please read! The job you save may be your own, or your children's future jobs.
P.S.
The accounting methods we are exposed to are throughput accounting methods.
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Summary: My coworker won't stop listening to this book
Review: He's got the book on tape version and is playing it over and over, without headphones. This is the second or third time he's listened to it. I seriously think he needs mental help.Also, why would ANY author name a machine "The Smegma"? Because this author did. I'm rather confused on that point.
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Summary: CD Edition: What were they thinking???
Review: There was enough said about the content of the book. It is, indeed, insightful and well-written. My comments are about the audio edition. This book comes on 9 CDs. However, each CD is not broken up into tracks, so if you want to listen again to a fragment, you have to start from the beginning of the CD! What a waste of time! I wanted to make notes on the main concept of a Goal, and I had to listen to the entire CD three times to get to the section I needed. After the third time, I just gave up and returned the whole book. If this is the way this publishing house formats all audio books, I will never buy another book published by them.
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Summary: The Goal should be required reading
Review: I had a chance to read the Goal after my employer made copies available to all managers in our organization. Being an automotive manufacturer the book seemed to be a perfect fit for helping us identify our organizations true goals. What I got was exactly what I expected. The book is told like a novel, with characters experiencing the turnaround of their manufacturing plant thru the eyes of the plant manager. During the process of re-organization, the main character, Alex, finds him personal life suffering as well as his managerial control, just like many of us. To resolve his issues, Alex, relies upon an old mentor Jonah to provide wisdom in reducing bottlenecks and increasing profits in the organization.
At times this book drags, but if you are in manufacturing, you will be amazed how true to life this book is and, if you have a short attention span, you will find the book is nicely divided into short chapters to give you a break to digest the information. The Goal: To make money!!
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Summary: The Goal: A Book Review
Review: June 25, 2003 What is the "Goal" of a business? The only clear objective is to make money. However, as this book points out, cost efficiencies, bad decisions and a steadfast tradition in the business world have overshadowed the "goal". Alex Rogo, the main character in the novel, has been given a timeline of 3 months to turn around his plant. Alex entails the assistance of Jonah, his old professor. The reader is soon taken on a journey through Alex's professional (and personal) world. During this expedition, he is forced to ask questions that at first seem trivial, but eventually open the doors of clarity in both of his worlds and his thought process is changed forever.
The major concept that I got from the book did not lie only in the three key elements of throughput, inventory and operating expenses or in determining where the constraints (bottlenecks) were in the production line. I feel that the unspoken (almost unspoken) element was in the paradigm shift of Alex and his associates' thought processes. It was the managerial way of analyzing problems that Jonah was ultimately changing, not the realization of bottlenecks and throughput. Yes, the location of the bottlenecks and change in the flow of production through them, helped increase throughput and led to the solution to the current problem. However, these were just symptoms of the true illness. The true problem was the way that management perceived situations and reacted instead of forecasting and planning. When Alex realized that he really didn't know "how" to manage was the major breakthrough in the novel for me. He finally discovered that his brainwashed way of thinking was what Jonah wanted him to eradicate. Only then did logically thinking through the problems, following a process and eventually managing through common sense did he make good decisions concerning his family, the plant, and eventually the division as a whole..
I believe that The Goal gave good insight into what generally occurs in the decision making process that management faces daily and that the purpose for managers to read this book is so that they can analyze their own way of thinking and then make adjustments accordingly. The book revealed to me that the religion of "old school" business is quite possibly the true constraint.
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Summary: Real education
Review: NO matter what your background this book can educate all. When a friend suggested this book to me I thought a novel set in a manufacturing plant won't be much of an entertainer let alone a business book. But my assumption was completely wrong...not only I found it to be gripping but I found myself reaching for that dairy and taking down a few notes.
The book is full of absolute gems and shows how businesses might have lost "The Goal" of actually being in business by missing the complete picture and instead concentrating on local optimums. A system of local optimums is not an optimum system but may turn out to be very inefficient.
The author starts from simple principles of making money - increasing net profits, return on investment and cash flow. He goes about defining some basic parameters which are so simple that they can be applied to any plant or a grocery store. I, being an electrical engineer was even able to draw parallels with the design of microprocessors. These are: THROUGHPUT - rate at which the system generates money through sales. It is the money coming into the system.
INVENTORY - all the money that system has invested in purchasing things that it intends to sell. It is the money currently inside the system.
OPERATIONAL EXPENSE - all the money the system spends in order to turn inventory into throughput. It is the money we have to pay to make throughput happen. In all, one measurement for the incoming money, one for the money stuck inside the system and one for the money going out. Any money lost is operational expense and any investement we can sell is inventory. So the goal is not to improve one measurement in isolation but to reduce both operational expense and inventory while simultaneously increasing throughput. Then it goes about describing bottleneck and non-bottleneck resource where a bottleneck is any resouce whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it. Hence, the capacity of the plant is the capacity of the bottleneck. So whatever the bottleneck produces in an hour the plant produces in an hour. The authour again introduces new parameters like setup time, process time, queue time and wait time any tries to study the phases of production scientifically. But all these parameters simply do not fit a linear model and the author tries to show how non-linear dependencies creep in. I think I might have missed a few points but I plan to reread it sometime soon.
Moral of the story - if you are going by the book and still things are going wrong start from ground zero and question all the set beliefs.
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Summary: Great book...plus
Review: This is a great book. But, I would also recommend "Strategic Organizational Change" by Beitler. Both books together are a great combination for managers.
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