The Goal

Today this post will verse about literature!! But you won´t regret, as if you haven´t read the book I will be talking about yet, you will get the priceless chance to discover a book worth its weight in gold!!

I was at home yesterday wondering about what I should read; I had a couple of books piling at my desk and waiting for me to get the time to look over them, when I suddenly glance at one of my favorite novels: The Goal, a Process of Ongoing Improvement, a management-orientated novel written by the Israeli physicist Eliyahu Moshe Goldratt. This novel was originally published in 1984 after months of struggle to get it printed. Since that, four million copies have been sold worldwide and the novel has been revised and republished in 1992 and 2004. In my pinion 4 million copies are way behind what it should have sold!!

The book is based in the Theory of Constraints coined by Goldratt and written as a piece of fiction staring Alex Rego, who manages a production plant which is lagging behind its competitors. At the beginning of the book he is told to have three months to turn his factory from unprofitable and unreliable into a successful one unless he wants to see it closed down. Alex with the help and advice he gets from of one of his former university professors through meetings and telephone calls, finally manage to increase the productivity of the factory turning it into one of the most profitable of the company.

The book points out the importance of the bottlenecks or constraints in the manufacturing process and how identifying them, however not always easy, has a deep impact on any factory´s productivity. Through the identification of bottlenecks and the implementation of measures to reduce the impact of them in the goods flow, Alex and his team mates manage to increase the productivity of the plant at the same time they reduce costs and hit their targets regarding customer orders processing and shipping.

The novel, besides Alex role as a head of a factory, also portraits part of his personal life depicting a sinking marriage at the begging of the book that changes as the book goes by to a trust based relationship at the end.

In my personal opinion this is a book everyone from accountants to production managers to CEO´s should read at least once in their lives, in my case, I try to read it as often as I can, as it´s not only a book from which you will acquire some basic supply chain notions, but also an easy to read and enjoyable book. Furthermore, I have learnt something new each time I have gone through it.

As a bonus, The Goal was followed by three other books “It´s Not Luck”, “Critical Chain” and “Necessary but Not Sufficient”. Although I have not read these sequels yet, as I have recently discovered them in what has been a pleasant surprise, I will hopefully get my hands on them very soon and won´t be long before I have read them all.

As you probably have figured out, I picked out The Goal from the shelf and started reading it again!!