The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

The basic story is built around the dilemmas facing Alex Rogo, a newly-appointed plant manager. The plant can't seem to ship, it's losing money, and bad things can happen to good people if all this doesn't change soon. Alex is at a loss for what to do until he pulls out a cigar that Jonah, a physicist from Israel, had recently given him. That cigar reminds him to contact Jonah for possible help. From there, the path to recovery begins.

Let me describe some of the many levels on which this novel is valuable.

First, the book explains how to see businesses as systems as well as any other book on this subject. It compares favorably in this area to such important works as The Fifth Discipline and the Fifth Discipline Handbook. The metaphor of how to speed up a slow-moving group of boy scouts will be visceral to anyone who has done any hiking with a group.

Second, the book helps you learn how to improve the performance of a system by providing you with a replicable process that you can apply to analyzing any human or engineering system. The primary metaphor is improving a manufacturing process, but the same principles apply more broadly to other circumstances.

Third, you will experience the power of the Socratic method as a way to stimulate your mind to learn, and to use Socratic questions to stimulate the minds of others to become better thinkers and doers.

Fourth, the authors also use problem simulation as a practical way to help you experience the learning process they are advocating.

Fifth, the book is unusually good in bringing home the consequences of letting your business process run in a vicious cycle: Your family life may also.

The pacing of the book is especially good. You are given time to stew with issues and come up with your own ideas before sample answers are provided by Alex and his staff in the novel.

Unlike many books that take complicated ideas and oversimplify them so the ideas lose their meaning, this book simplifies ideas in ways that enhance their meaning by making the ideas easier to see and employ.

If you do not understand all of the ins and outs of typical factory accounting, you may get a little lost from time to time. But that's not a problem. That accounting just distorts common perceptions of what needs to be done. You can safely skip anything you don't understand if you don't have to deal with such issues.

While I did not observe any overt errors in the book, companies that do not put an asset charge on operational assets could make the mistake from this book of seeking too little profit. You need to earn on-going returns that exceed your cost of capital, too.

You will get the most from this book if you read The Fifth Discipline following it (if you have not read that book already). The discussion of the beer game simulation in The Fifth Discipline will add to your understanding of system dynamics.

Following that book, I suggest that you then read The Balanced Scorecard and The Strategy-Focused Organization for ideas about how to use goals, measurements, and rewards to concentrate attention onto the highest leverage areas for your system.

After you have finished employing what you have learned and helping others around you to learn more also, I suggest that you think about how to optimize the full upside potential more rapidly through the use of irresistible forces and 2,000 percent solutions to speed your progress. That should leave you with even more success and more time to enjoy it.

Unblock the constraints on your progress!


A 150-page text squeezed into a 300-page novel.   September 29, 2002
Keith Smith (Austin, TX)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful

In "The Goal," Eliyahu Goldratt has written what has to be one of the most-read business books in existance. It's an introduction to his "Theory of Constraints" (TOC), but it's presented in a radically different form than the traditional business book. Most business books are either substantial, yet dry, text books or more engaging, but less substantive, anecdote-filled treatises. "The Goal" is a novel. About a Plant Manager. Who learns about the Theory of Constraints. While saving his plant. Sounds electrifying, huh?

My first reaction when I heard about it was: "A novel about a plant manager? And people actually paid money and read this?" Part of me wanted to read it for the sheer novelty of it. And part of me was interested in some of the buzz I'd heard about TOC. And here's the weird part; the book actually works. It's engaging, particularly if you've ever worked in or around a plant (and know how intimately your personal success is tied to the success of nebulous factors that no one seems to understand). It gradually introduces you to the concepts of TOC in a way that gives you a decent handle on them without mining them to the point of mind-numbing boredom.

What is TOC? Well, without re-writing the book here, it's about changing the focus of the organization to understand that the overall flow of work is more important to the success of the organization than the contribution of single parts. That is, managing the manufacturing capacity of the process is more important than ensuring that each manufacturing machine is producing at optimal capacity. In this sense, it's a lot like mathematical optimization, but TOC presents this in a fashion that's much more intuitive (it almost kills me to say that, as I spent a lot of my life gathering math degrees). If you're interested, Goldratt explains all of this in a much shorter book, The Theory of Constraints; however, it's much less interesting than The Goal. And as it basically covers the same information, I'd recommend The Goal before The Theory of Constraints.

There are no explosions. No one dies, and there are no conspiracies. At the end of the story, the hero (Alex Roge) doesn't end up in a nail-biting shootout with the enemy (although that might be a nice touch). It's a simple manufacturing plant in a company town that's doomed to extinction (the town and the plant), if things don't improve and improve quickly. And you find yourself pulling for Alex and his team as they honestly try to save the company and the town.

As a novelist, Goldratt will certainly never be mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway or Steinbeck. But don't sell the book short; it communicates a fundamentally different business point of view in a quick and effective fashion. And it does it in a way that has the reader anticipating the next development, rather than having to force themselves to slog from chapter to chapter. In the end, I'm glad I read it, and I recommend it highly.

Now if he could just turn Alex into an action hero for the sequel...


For the boardroom and bedroom...   February 21, 2001
Mark Latta
26 out of 29 found this review helpful

First, I would commend Eliyahu M. Goldratt for getting "the Goal" right. In this age of political correctness and "good to the community," this is the only management book that states the goal of businesses is to make money. Bravo!

Secondly, as a process guy, I would recommend this book to anyone who is concerned about how to make processes better. The author does this in a special way, by relating in ongoing improvement in terms of the aforementioned goal. Goldratt's relates his process "theory of constraints" and "bottlenecks" in in a holistic way to the overall running of a business. Again, this is the only place I have seen this idea as well articulated and connected to strategic business goals.

Finally, I would recommend this book since it presents the information in one of the best ways, through a story. If you enjoyed Blanchard's "One Minute Manager," Johnson's "Who Moved My Cheese," or Cox's "Zapp!" this might be a good book for you. I will warn you though, this book is considerably thicker and heavier reading than the above three books. It still makes for an easy read nonetheless!

There is also the side story of Alex Rogo's deteriorating relationship with his wife to keep the story going. Although not critical to the main points of the book, it does make for an interesting read while not bogging down the main idea.

In summary, this is an insightful, interesting book about the real nature of business and improving processes. I definitely recommend it for all the reasons stated above. And, since there is a definite, warm "human side" to the story, it is a book that would count as much toward pleasure reading as it would a serious book about business. A must for the boardroom table as well as the bedside nightstand!


New Way of Thinking/Analysis--Leads to Breakthrough Aha's   February 28, 2000
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

I've read every book Eli Goldratt has written and am waiting for his newest. This is not a boring business processes book--it is one you will learn from and it is written in a way you will remember it like a good movie. Believe it or not, there are times when you must create a constraint in order to make your business more profitable--even if that means slowing down productivity in some areas while focusing on others. This guy is nuts you say--but this book will make you believe it. I was skeptical at first--but one year later I was speaking at a national convention with six other speakers presenting how we used the knowledge to turn the Titanic. Continuing to use this knowledge lead to corporate awards, to include a close finish for the Vice President Al Gore Award, for making awesome changes and delivering results no one else in the 85 unit company could do--the company CEO said "we were the model". I attribute a majority of the success to "The Goal" and the rest of the credit goes to my supervisors who also read "The Goal". It will change the way you think.


Breaking down the walls of Cost Accounting   February 3, 2000
8 out of 8 found this review helpful

Although this book is intended as a lesson for operations managers, the concepts taught proved invaluable to me as a Controller. The Goal teaches us that conventional cost accounting measurements are not a true indicator of the success or failure of a plant. Moreover, they can actually hinder improvements and rational decision making. The book teaches us to break out of the mold we have been stuck in for so long. Getting it on audio tapes was a plus, as it was a much more productive way to spend my drive home. To any accountant who has not read this book DO SO NOW, for your plant's sake!