The Goal, 30th Anniversary edition
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal, a gripping novel, is transforming management thinking throughout the world. It is a book to recommend to your friends in industry—even to your bosses—but not to your competitors.
Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant—or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a professor from student days—Jonah—to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done. The story of Alex’s fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas, which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC), developed by Eli Goldratt.
One of Eli Goldratt’s convictions was that the goal of an individual or an organization should not be defined in absolute terms. A good definition of a goal is one that sets us on a path of ongoing improvement.
Pursuing such a goal necessitates more than one breakthrough. In fact it requires many. To be in a position to identify these breakthroughs we should have a deep understanding of the underlying rules of our environment. Twenty-five years after writing The Goal, Dr. Goldratt wrote “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants.” In this article he provided the underlying rules of operations. This article appears at the end of this book.
The 30th Anniversary edition represents the first time the narrative in The Goal has been substantially updated. Goldratt’s Five Focusing Steps have been added, and his essay, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants,” is included. The Fortune Small Business interviews (known by some as the “case studies”) that appeared in the 20th and 25th Anniversary editions have been removed from the book, but are available on this website.
Endorsements:
“Now more than ever, The Goal is my first recommendation for CIOs, CTOs and DevOps to better see What to Change, What to Change to and just How to Cause the Change. Thank you, Eli!” —Kevin Behr, co-author of The Phoenix Project
“Like Mrs. Fields and her cookies,The Goal was too tasty to remain obscure. Companies began buying big batches and management schools included it in their curriculums. —Fortune Magazine
“A survey of the reading habits of managers found that… the one management book they have actually read from cover to cover is The Goal.” —The Economist
“Goal readers are now doing the best work of their lives.” —Success Magazine
“A factory may be an unlikely setting for a novel, but the book has been wildly effective.” —Tom Peters
Required reading for Amazon’s management
$24.95
