The Goal - review

The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox is a gripping novel which is highly recommended in many business schools and followed by many managers. It took me 3 evenings to finish this book. It was 5 yrs before I first came across this book but at that time I couldn’t understand more than 100 pages …I am happy that finally     I am done with it now J

The Goal is not on personality development( like many people may think from the title ) but about production management, it is about realizing the goal of a plant and achieving it. Author explains the concepts on bottlenecks, theory of constraints, inventory, accounting etc in a simple and clearway in the form of a story about a manager.

     The story revolves around Alex Rogo, who is a married plant manager fighting to meet the output demands of his plant. He receives a notice that he has only 3 months time to improve performance of his plant or it will be closed. Because of spending most of the time in his plant his wife gets upset and this adds to his pressure. Alex implements the changes in his plant with the guidance from his friend Jonah. Jonah who is a scientist through his Socratic approach guides Alex in operating his plant and enlightens him on the concepts of bottlenecks, etc. Jonah doesn’t just help Alex to improve his plant’s performance but also helps him in developing the thinking process required so that Alex doesn't ask Jonah for help again. Finally Alex realizes that common sense is all that required and common sense is not so common.

By the end of the book you will understand..

-What exactly is the goal of a plant and what is productivity

-What is throughput, inventory, operation expense ( these terms are not defined in the conventional way) and how to manage these three to reach the goal.

-Why it is unproductive if workers are working all the time without any idle time( this is very interesting)

-What are bottlenecks and how to use them efficiently to improve performance of the plant

-Relation between dependent events and statistical fluctuations

-The capacity shouldn’t be balanced with demand but it is the flow that should be balanced

-The power of Socratic approach in dealing with others

- Theory of constraints

- The manager is concerned fundamentally about “what to change?”,”what to change to?”,” how to change?”

Most importantly you will understand the relation between “production”, “accounting” and “marketing”.