The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Jesse Chen        

MANGT 241

Dan Minick

11/8 /2017

The Goal Essay

        The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, is a story about a man who is given 3 months to turn the facility where he works around or else the plant shuts down. It is a fictional story based on actual premises from Toyota and Hitachi so that it can be told in an intuitive and simple way for anybody to understand. The fact that the story itself is made up doesn’t take away from the lessons that can be learned and applied to many everyday things we go through every day. The ideas that are introduced in this book were things that went against what other companies were doing and even things that were being taught as basic practices at the time. The Goal was meant to inspire the reader to think outside of his/her comfort zone as well as what we may consider the social norm.

        One thing I personally enjoyed in the book was the analogies they made. In a rocky stream, how would you figure out what rocks you would need to remove to maximize the amount of water coming through? By lowering the amount of water and seeing which rocks remain submerged. These kinds of analogies made understanding the issues with, in this example having too much inventory queued up in production, the plant and how simple the solution would be. The same goes with the analogy with Herbie and the boy scouts. I thought it was a little cheesy how the problem with Herbie and the scouts was obviously created just for the sake of creating a parallel to the plant’s problems, but it made sense. I believe the point was to show how we can find parallels with seemingly trivial things we find in our lives and use it to find a solution to a problem elsewhere.

        The thing that surprised me most in the book was when Jonah was telling Alex how a work force that’s constantly working is actually very inefficient. This was counterintuitive for me; I’ve had countless experiences in work and group projects where work was given to people who weren’t doing anything for the sake of being “efficient”. This seems like it would be a good practice, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Unless everybody and everything is working at the exact same pace, which would probably not happen often, it is ok for people and workstations to have downtime after finished works so long as said workstation is not a bottleneck. A bottleneck is a term used frequently throughout The Goal that is derived from the act of turning a liquid filled bottle upside down. When the liquid goes through the narrow neck of the bottle, it slows down the rate of liquids moving out of the bottle. In the context of The Goal, it is basically any task or person that yields tasks dependent on it and is also the slowest part of a process. It halts production until it is finished, and the people in the story quickly learn that they need to figure out what the plant’s bottlenecks and improve throughput for them until they no longer become bottlenecks.