Book: The goal

November 11, 2021

The goal

Author

Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Summary

The story of a plant manager who discovers the benefit of systematically assessing the processing bottlenecks instead of relying on conventional wisdom.

Takeaways

Instead of relying on conventional wisdom, it is crucial to deeply reflect on the goal of an operation or organization and take a scientific and systematic approach to explore the factors (bottlenecks or constraints) that prevent us from reaching it.

The following process can serve as a blueprint to work towards achieving any goal.

  1. Identify the system’s constraint.
  2. Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint.
  3. Subordinate everything else to the above decisions.
  4. Elevate the system’s constraint.
  5. If in the previous steps a constraint has been broken, go back to step 1, but do not allow inertia to cause a system constraint.

Quotes

“Finally, and most importantly, I wanted to show that we can all be outstanding scientists. The secret of being a good scientist, I believe, lies not in our brain power. We have enough. We simply need to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see. The key ingredient is to have the courage to face inconsistencies between what we see and deduce and the way things are done."

“I stop and look at him. “What are we asking for? For the ability to answer three simple questions: ‘what to change?’, ‘what to change to?’, and ‘how to cause the change?’ Basically what we are asking for is the most fundamental abilities one would expect from a manager. Think about it. If a manager doesn’t know how to answer those three questions, is he or she entitled to be called manager?”

“The lesson that Shewhart brought to manufacturing from Physics, and Deming made known worldwide, is that trying to be more accurate than the noise (in our case, trying to use sophisticated algorithms that consider every possible parameter in an environment of high variability) does not improve things but makes them worse—the results will most certainly not be an improvement but a deterioration in due-date performance."