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Submitted by fchalif on
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I recommend this book for Managers and any team member in a manufacturing environment.
The author tells a story of the difficulties experienced by a Plant Manager facing a potential closing of his plant. This approach makes this book very useful for all levels of staff to read and to get an understanding of 3 main concepts:
- Throughput (total cycle through to Sales)
- Inventory
- Operational Expense

Those concepts and relative roles in a plant are thoroughly explained. Mr. Goldblatt's also explains his Theory of Constraints and how to consider bottlenecks.

Good book and a very easy read.

jhack's picture

This is a very insightful book. If you're in manufacturing, in particular, this should be required reading, although it applies generally to all forms of work.

We all know a "Herbie."

John Hack

tlhausmann's picture
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I read this same book while on vacation this summer. It is a quick read.

One key take-away from this book is how you can spot bottlenecks and performance issues in your own operations (even if not in manufacturing) because similar issues pop-up in managing independent projects across limited staff.

gvgreen's picture
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I purchased several copies of "The Goal" - you can get them at a reasonable price on Ebay - and gave them to my Production management staff. They were very interested and motivated by this book.

Goldratt continues on with Alex Rogo's story in "It's Not Luck". This expands on many of the ideas introduced in "The Goal" and I would recommend it if you are interested in the Theory of Constraints. I had purchased a more comprehensive book on the Theory of Constraints but it was hard going until I read "It's Not Luck".

Gordon Green

PierG's picture

I strongly suggest the book (and also the others cited here) also for who has no interest in manufacturing: the manufacturing context is just an example of a "way of thinking".
Brilliant: it can be a breakthrough ...
PierG
http://pierg.wordpress.com

shidavwil's picture

I am not in manufacturing but I do project management, program management and currently creating PMO-like organization. I read this and others by Goldratt, especially Critical Chain passing all of them around to the managers and project managers in my world. I have had others come back to me and want to borrow for a second time. We found parallels to our world (technology) and on each read found (or reminded ourselves) of how to handle situations.

The Goal, It's Not Luck and Critical Chain in my opinion should be apart of every project managers library.

Thanks for bringing this up.