Book Review: The Goal - A Process of Ongoing Improvement

"The Goal" is an interesting business novel (fiction) written by Elihayu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox. The book is about how Alex Rogo, a plant manager; turns his plant from bring in loss to money making one. He takes the help of a physicist named Jonah who helps Rogo over short meetings and telephone calls. The central theme of the book is the "Theory of Constraints" proposed by the author that gives good insights about how to alleviate the constraints and bottlenecks in a system. The author has beautifully illustrated the identification of a bottleneck in a system through the story when Alex Rogo takes his son and his school friends for a trek and during the trek, he came to understand how a boy with a heavy luggage on his back was slowing down the speed of rest of the group following him. The author has drawn a beautiful analogy between the trek and the movement of the materials in a plant. The key point is that the output of a system is the output of the slowest or weakest link in that system that becomes the bottleneck.  The identification of a bottleneck is very important when the systems are complex as in an industrial plant where the process map typically shows lot of parallel and sequential processing of materials. The book also takes the readers through the thought processes through which Alex Rogo and his team identifies the bottleneck in his manufacturing plant by keeping a record of the accumulation of inventory at the input and output of different machines. The solution to the above problem lies in increasing the capacity of the bottleneck, but it is to be noted that once the capacity of the bottleneck is increased, there will be a new bottleneck somewhere else in the system (typically called as wandering bottleneck in the world of operations management). The book also gives a good insights on the strategic capacity planning. Though the settings in the book is of a manufacturing plant, but the lessons of "Theory of Constraints" can be applied to other fields of operations like project management as well.

Another theme that the author has highlighted in the book is the Socratic approach to solve the problems used by Jonah when he posed questions to Rogo and his team during every discussion. The approach is named after the Greek philosopher Socrates. The method involves a dialogue where the problems are discussed in the form of different kinds of open, guiding and closing questions posed to stimulate the critical thinking. The pace of the book is good. I enjoyed reading the book and I believe that the solutions to the tough problems starts with asking the right questions.