The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
View on GoodreadsEli Goldratt's 1984 business novel — a struggling plant manager learns the Theory of Constraints from a mysterious mentor — that became the canonical introduction to operations and constraint thinking.
Core ideas
- The goal of any business is to make money; everything else (efficiency, utilization, inventory) is a proxy that can mislead if disconnected from the goal.
- Throughput is governed by the bottleneck — improving any non-bottleneck step doesn't improve total output, but it does inflate inventory and cost; identify the constraint, then subordinate everything else to it.
- Five focusing steps: identify the constraint, exploit it, subordinate, elevate, repeat — and the constraint will move, so the work never ends.
Published2004
Pages384
ISBN9780884271789
ReadOct 2023
