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Essay about Eliyahu M. Goldratt's The Goal

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The Goal

Here are the principles behind the dramatic turnaround story in The Goal.

The goal of a manufacturing organization is to make money. Jonah poses this as a question: "What is the goal?" and Rogo actually struggles with it for a day or two, but any manager or executive that can't answer that question without hesitation should be fired without hesitation.

But then again, the goal isn't clear to everyone. One of the characters in the book, an accountant, responds to an offhand comment about the goal with a confused "The goal? You mean our objectives for the month?" That's sure to strike a chord with a lot of readers.

At an operational level, measure your success toward the goal with these three metrics:

Throughput …show more content…

Decrease the unit of work. If you've got people idle, you can afford to have them do their work in smaller chunks. Under a cost-accounting model, this hurts their "efficiency" by removing certain economies of scale. But you have much faster turn-around time. Everyone's more flexible. Work flows more smoothly. (Well, this is what the book says.)

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The Goal - A Process Engineering Novel

I read Eliyahu M. Goldratt's novel The Goal the other night, instead of sleeping.

The book has two parts. In the first 264 pages, a manufacturing plant manager turns his failing plant into a tremendous success. That part of the book ends with the manager's promotion to a position with oversight over several failing plants. In the second part of the book (73 pages), the manager prepares for his new job by trying to deduce a repeatable "process of ongoing improvement." He's trying to make sense of what happened in the first part of the book so he'll have half a chance of repeating that success on a greater scale.

For now, I'll set aside considerations of why The Goal is a novel, how effective it is as a book, whether it succeeds as literature, and so on. This article is primarily about the ideas behind the book, and why some are valuable while others are probably quite useless.

How to Turn Around a Failing Plant

The first part of the book is about a manufacturing plant.

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