Eli Goldratt's Books

In the mid-80s, Digital Equipment Corporation worked to dramatically improve its manufacturing productivity. The Goal was a key text for the transformation. As preparation for a Japan Study Mission to study Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing and Total Quality Control (TQC), I had to read The Goal.

This simple Socratic-style novel completely changed my framework for how to design highly productive processes. A physicist by training, Goldratt was astounded that business people had only one way to solve for complex workflows – treat wevery problem as a large number problem. Physicists also had another technique tup their sleeves for difficult problems using analysis.

His core insight was instead of trying to optimize every step in a process (the financial analyst method), optimization would be best occur by identifying the 2-3 steps that were the real bottlenecks or constraints in any real world process and then optimize those.

He quickly demonstrated success but then ran into a brick wall when he tried to teach others how to do it through traditional pedagogy (see The Race for the formal professional presentation). Out of desperation he wrote a simple novel, The Goal. Over night the book became a self-published best seller and hundreds of manufacturing plants made great strides in overall productivity and profitability.

A couple of months lather the sixty year old assistant to my Senior VP at Digital Equipment Corporation (now part of HP) asked if there was a book that she could read and understand that would help her understand the manufacturing market for professional services. I gave he a copy to her and forgot about it (by that time I’d give hundreds of copies to other professionals). Imagine my surprise a month later at our quarterly worldwide executive team meeting when the U.S. manager was droning on about a complex problem that his management team had not been able to solve. Ellie exclaimed in the middle of the presentation “Skip, he’s describing a ‘Herbie’!” Ya. You betcha.

Then, I suggested she describe to the team how to solve the problem. Ellie went to the white board and laid it out for the team. Everyone’s jaw dropped, but they immediately saw the solution would work. Over the next three months, we cut our costs by $10M and increased our customer satisfaction by 25%. A couple hundred more copies of The Goal were sold and distributed and Ellie got a well deserved bonus. Goldratt had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams – even the least experienced amongst us could solve complex systems workflows and processes with his insights.