The Goal has "required reading for Amazon employees" all over the cover, and was assigned reading for work. It's basically a business process book written in the form of a novel, which I find strange and quite distracting, but since I was getting paid to read it I plowed through and read it anyway.
The POV character is a plant manager for a manufacturer of widgets (it's never even discussed what the widgets are, what they do, and who the customers are --- it's quite clear that this is a business book for managers who should be able to manage anything and don't care about the technical details). The plant is in trouble, always late for delivering goods for customers, and is in danger of being shut down.
The POV character recalls a physics instructor who's become a big name business consultant, and calls him for help. The consultant then guides the POV character through what's obviously Toyota's JIT manufacturing system, identifying the bottlenecks in the production process and then re-orienting the plant in favor of maximizing throughput on the bottlenecks regardless of other artificial metrics such as efficiency on non-bottlenecked machines and processes. Various problems are overcome, some of which are buffering the bottlenecked processes, reducing batch sizes, and thereby reducing latency from order to delivery, which then enables more sales to be made.
Then the author takes everything one more level up in abstraction and designates a process for this type of analysis: (1) identify the goal (2) identify the bottlenecks (3) re-orient everything around the bottlenecks (4) increase capacity around the bottlenecks (5) re-evaluate.
In between all this, the POV character has to overcome his wife leaving him because he spends so much time at work, and goes through epiphany after epiphany over how his egghead acquaintance who's a management consult is so useful.
Maybe the kind of people who don't read real novels but love lean manufacturing think this is a great book. Me, I think the book could have been much better if it had been a history of Toyota's development of the lean manufacturing (JIT) system.
1 comment:
I am a big fan of Toyota's lean production methods and this isn't it. See Amazon and search on "Toyota lean" for a long list.
Many MBA management types love this book and similar ones, but I couldn't stand it. The storytelling is really lame and the methods introduced are trivial. Not recommended.
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