Average Rating: 
Rating:  - The goal is about the objective of any company: Making Money
I had to read this book as a part of my Integrated Manufacturing and Control Systems in my Industrial Engineering PHD program. The book is great. This book is a must to read for:
1. All Industrial Engineers with management ambitions.
2. Middle and Upper Management
A lot of companies had already given this book to their staff to read. The book is a nice story that you can be read in less than a week (spending couple of hours every night before you go to bed). It is written in a very simple language.
What "The Goal" talks about is a simple and obvious problem: Make Money by starting with eliminating bottlenecks and reducing batch sizes. Unfortunately we are in 2003 right now and lot of companies still measure the performance of their plants based on efficiency and employee utilization and not on how much money they make.
For the old school people to see a worker idle is a disaster in manufacturing but to have him over producing is a good thing, "The Goal" explain why this situation may not be a disaster and may actually be a good thing.
After you finish reading this book if are a middle manager or upper management you should start reading "It's Not Luck",.
Rating:  - A "Must Read" for anyone who deals with processes
Sure, this book is targeted to managers in production, but the insights are equally applicable to consultants, bankers, or anyone else who deals with processes in their business routine.I found this book highly entertaining. I was pulled into the problems facing the title character, and enjoyed the process of working through the answers. If you like novels which impart a great deal of wisdom, this is a perfect book. It is not dry like many of its counterparts in the business section. Regardless of how applicable you find it to your business, you will not regret the time spent in these pages. My only complaint is the ending. It seems the author was rushed by the publisher to come to a hasty conclusion. I feel like I just finished part one of a two part book. Where is the smooth ending? The book lost a star for this reason alone. john.grounds@sirjohnathon.com
Rating: - A novel about manufacturing and the Theory of Constraints
This book was one of the recommended supplementary readings for a course on Cost Accounting I took during my MBA studies at the University of Michigan Business School. As everyone points out, this is written as a novel and therefore dresses up its points and teaches through the story of a manger of a failing manufacturing plant and a workaholic also failing in marriage.You can guess that the protagonist learns / discovers Goldratt's Theory of Constraints and everything in his life turns around. Even though all this is obvious, it is a decent read and although much of it has aged (smoking and drinking at work, not many women in the workplace, no cell phones, etc), and even though other ideas have come along developing or moving past TOC, it still is an important source text. If you are interested in manufacturing and the ideas that have affected manufacturing for the past decade and a half, this book is a must read. The basic notion is that traditional cost accounting measures can distort and therefore misrepresent costs and therefore cause behavior to work against firm profitability. The TOC basically treats all costs as fixed (in the short term) and forces managers to think through and re-design their system for maximum throughput. This is a good book, a good text, and an important historical document of the mid-eighties that still has influence today. If you haven't read it, hey, it's still new, right? You'll be glad you read it even if you adopt some other manufacturing point of view. At least you will be better prepared to discuss TOC when it comes up in conversation with other manufacturing / cost accounting types.
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