Rating: 
Summary: Boorish and Self Gratifying
Review: I gave up reading this ridiculous book 2/3 of the way through and feel cheated of 10 hours of my life. (I have never quit a book midway through). The entire premise of this pile of kaka can be summarized as follows: All conflict has one or two root causes - if you can determine those causes, you can solve your conflict. Don't waste your money on this author's thinly disquised self-elevating drivel. How much did I hate this book? Enough to take the time to write a review. You will learn more by renting "Dumb and Dumber" than you will by reading this book. I wish I could rate it lower. I want my money back.
Rating:
Summary: Boorish and Self Gratifying
Review: I gave up reading this ridiculous book 2/3 of the way through and feel cheated of 10 hours of my life. I have never quit a book midway through). The entire premise of this pile of kaka can be summarized as follows: All conflict has one or two root causes - if you can determine those causes, you can solve your conflict. Don't waste your money on this author's thinly disquised self-elevating drivel. How much did I hate this book? Enough to take the time to write a review. You will learn more by renting "Dumb and Dumber" than you will by reading this book. I wish I could rate it lower. I want my money back.
Rating: 
Summary: Changed the way I think about business problems
Review: I liked this book better than The Goal. It is loaded with information on the theory of constraints thinking process. The value of these techniques are termendous. A great follow up to this book is William Dettmer's Breaking the Constraints to World-Class Performance
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book But Doesn't Stand Alone
Review: I've read this book several times. It does a wonderful job teaching when to apply the various TOC tools and a little on how. Depending on what you are doing, I recommend combining It's Not Luck with Thinking for a Change by Scheinkopf and/or Throughput Accounting. Most people need both the 10,000' view from The Goal, The Race and It's Not Luck and the details provided by the APICS series and some of the North River Press books. Take care when purchasing detailed books, since the quality varies greatly.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book But Doesn't Stand Alone
Review: I've read this book several times. It does a wonderful job teaching when to apply the various TOC tools and a little on how. Depending on what you are doing, I recommend combining It's Not Luck with Thinking for a Change by Scheinkopf and/or Throughput Accounting. Most people need both the 10,000' view from The Goal, The Race and It's Not Luck and the details provided by the APICS series and some of the North River Press books. Take care when purchasing detailed books, since the quality varies greatly.
Rating: 
Summary: Eli, you should re-hire Jeff Cox...
Review: In term of contents, this book is marvelous. In terms of plot and story-telling style, this book is quite dry for a novel, comparing to THE GOAL.
This book doesn't offer a pleasure of good reading. That makes it huge different with THE GOAL. Eli probably needs Jeff Cox to fix them.
Rating:
Summary: It is the best book of the management for novel to me!
Review: It is easy to understand what is the management. And it stress basic technology. Trust me, it is a good book!
Rating:
Summary: Disappointment
Review: It's not luck is another novel about Mr. Rogo and his career. Where the first novel (the Goal) introduced a number of concepts relating to manufacturing, this one tries to convince us that the nowadays VP of a group magically discovers the definition and use of Marketing halfway through the book (who promotes a guy to a VP position without the guy knowing at least the basics about marketing?). Another revelation he magically puts on us is that Knowledge Managament is a very important concept, as well as the revelation that the book value of a company is different from the real value. Sigh, this is taught in every MBA course in existence (at least it should be). Furthermore, we should believe that the main character who is obviously severely brain-damaged (together with his apple-pie family), yet manages to become CEO of a large conglomerate? The author is hailed like a genius that has discovered so much truths... like the resource based-view of the firm (even though he doesn't understand that this is what he has discovered). If you do find this believable, I have some dotcom stocks to sell you, I promise that they will soon rebound... The Goal is worth reading, but this book is a waste of paper and money, buy something else, like a Barbara Cartland novel.
Rating:
Summary: Goldratt attacks sales, marketing, and segmentation
Review: It's Not Luck is the follow up to the Goal. Written in the form of a Novel, it examines different value perceptions of the market. You'll learn about ultra variable costing, utilizing excess capacity to serve seemingly unprofitable market segments, and how to break down barriers to achieve new avenues to profitability. Priceline is a perfect example of an entire company built on exploiting constraints in the marketplace, and wringing every last bit of revenue (maybe one day profitably) out of previously unused capacity. The book provides a brief introduction to the Thinking Processes, which are used to examine conflicting logical arguments, and develop a workable solution, satisfactory to both sides. Within the book, the methodology of the Thinking Processes is applied to both business dilemmas, and to that of parent/teenager relationships. It's all about building understanding between people with differing perspectives, and the variety of situations to which it is applied clearly illustrates the versatility of Goldratt's methods. If you found "The Goal" valuable, you'll like this one, though w/o Jeff Cox, the writing isn't quite as good as the Goal. To continue your journey into the world of TOC and the TP (Theory of Constraints and Thinking Processes) look for books by H. William Dettmer. No novel formats in Dettmer's books, that I've read, but much more thorough explanation of TOC. For TOC on project management, check out Goldratt's "Critical Chain"!
Rating: 
Summary: Alex Rogo and His Team to the Rescue Again!
Review: It's Not Luck is the sequel to Eliyahu Goldratt's great business novel, The Goal. After their success in The Goal, Alex and his team have all been promoted into the key positions in the faltering Diversified Businesses group in their conglomerate. The whole company is faltering, and great pressure is put on Alex and the team to turn their businesses around. The story emphasizes the Thinking Processes from The Goal, and the importance of using them in business and in personal life. The problems addressed are primarily ones of (1) tailoring the bundle of business product and service offerings for customers in ways that create profit margin advantages across the business (2) by building on benefits from adding value for customers in improved ways and (3) creating these advances in ways that competitors cannot easily duplicate. The examples include a printing business for packaging, a beauty salon products business, and providing a service and parts intensive product. The book's main story is interesting, and will keep you turning the pages. If you only read this as a novel about the caring manager and parent as a hero, you will find this to be a five star book. If you want the book to help you learn new methods, you will find it not too beneficial. The examples are developed at such a level of generality that you will probably learn little from them. I graded the book down two stars for this weakness. Most readers won't know any more about how to create advantaged business models at the end of the book than they did at the beginning, except that they are to remember to apply the lessons from The Goal to all of their businesses. The concepts that the book suggests are all perfectly valid and helpful ones. The first notion is to think of your customer and yourself as one entity. How can the two entities be combined in order to create the most value for both? The second notion is to then think about combining your business with acquisitions or being acquired by others so that the new business model can be applied to all these enterprises. I hope you do learn how to develop these commendable ideas. After you finish reading this book, I suggest that you think about all of the ways that current measurements in your business cause you to optimize the performance of parts of your enterprise rather than the whole business and that of your customers. If you can locate those flaws, you can then begin to change the measurements to become those that reward the correct enterprise-customer optimization goal. The rest of the benefits will tend to flow from making that change, even if you never become very good at using the Thinking Process described in this book. Self-interest can take you a long way. Become truly symbiotic with your customers in ways that enhance vitality for all! And don't be afraid to think about how to include employees, suppliers, shareholders, and the communities you serve in this consideration of optimization!
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