The Goal is a business novel. It’s interesting enough to read after work, and valuable enough that you’ll be a little smarter when you return to work the next morning.
I would not normally expect a book written 20 years ago about a manufacturing plant to have much to say about modern-day information technology. But there are valuable lessons here about process management, meaning literally how to manage any process. They’re presented as lessons about how to run a manufacturing plant, but they’re really lessons about how to think.
The book is a novel, although you shouldn’t read it for tips on character development or crafty plot work. The format is a slave to the mission, or dare I say the goal? The characters arrive at answers after false starts and detours, enabling the reader to experience the analysis that would not be present in a one-page summary of “Eli Goldratt’s Ideas About Process Management.”
This is, in fact, one of the lessons of the book: learning is a result of doing, not of being told.
Even so, I’ll share one of the key concepts of the “Theory of Constraints,” an idea introduced here that apparently revolutionized the manufacturing world. Quoting from Goldratt’s consulting website: “just as the strength of a chain is dictated by its weakest link, the performance of any value-chain is dictated by its constraint.” If you can find the worst-performing section of any process, or code, or team, then you’ve found the limiting factor on the system’s overall throughput. Fix that bottleneck and you will have improved the system.
The main character in the book arrives at this conclusion in a long passage describing a hike with a group of Boy Scouts. I won’t recount the story here, because it’s the best part of the book — essentially, the main character proves the Theory of Constraints by analysing hikers on a trail. It’s far removed from running a manufacturing plant, or from managing a software project, or from being productive with your free time for that matter, but Goldratt’s ideas still apply.
I recommend The Goal. I learned from it, and I can imagine rereading it in a few years as a refresher course on clear thinking.
Patronize these links, man:
posted to area: Non-Fiction
updated: 2005-10-24 05:46:03
