“The Goal” – By Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox
“The Goal” is as it vividly explains, is a book on achieving goals. Eliyahu Goldratt, world famous Israeli physicist turned business consultant, the creator of the “Theory of constraints”, in his work “The Goal”, explains a lot about managerial skills, to achieve higher productivity and efficiency, in a simple and lucid manner.
Goldratt takes a very practical example of today’s world, an Engineer with an MBA degree, Mr. Alex Rogo, as his protagonist and his struggle to get a loss making company to a profit making one along with his family in the back-ground, obviously an important one, to explain the drudgeries of a manufacturing engineer’s life. Goldratt explains several management skills to be inherited in any professional’s life with ease, in this thought provoking novel based management textbook. The ideas expressed in this book, although difficult to be digested normally, are easily conceptualized in the form of a novel, which any professional can easily relate to.
The book mainly talks about the protagonist, Alex, his superiors and his team along with his management Guru, Jonah, who changes the whole perspective of Alex’s life with his simple messages, opens Alex to brand new world of bottlenecks, variability, etc. and their effects in the working of any manufacturing firm.
Alex is the Plant Manager of a division of Unico, which is a rather loss making plant, and having a lot of trouble mainly as far as its with its productivity and meeting with the deadlines was concerned. His superior, Bill Peach always targets him for petty issues and makes him feel low about everything that is going on in his plant, obviously in terms of meeting the deadlines to ship the final product and the plant’s inefficiency. Alex ...