The Goal
I must say I’ve never really like a self-improvement book, because my belief to the stubborn self decided that I will never really gain any self-triggering behavioral change after reading such a book.
Well, in some ways, maybe I just thought it would be a boring read. So the motivation has to come from outside which my management was having my team to have a 5 must read and they are all self-improving genre or business oriented. And I thought I could give it a try.
So I picked The Goal since was told it was the 2nd easiest read after Who Moved My Cheese (that old fart piff~) and indeed it was pretty good although having a machine’s manufacturing plant as the background was not as excited as a fashion high street in New York or some ancient ruins in the middle of African jungle.
The story had us plundering into the world of Alex Rogo, a manufacturing plant manager who is in deep shit over the plant’s various issue like delayed delivery schedules, stack of unsold inventory, staff laid off, bossy boss, and even his marriage life that his wife thought he puts work in front of family.
So Alex was at the bottom of his life at the age of 40, totally a loser but luckily he is not giving up so easily. And luckily (touche!!) he found his Physics lecturer Jonah (let me assume he is Jew and a narrow framed spectacle) who inspired and taught him a series of ways to turn his plant around. Over here it is getting very preachy and God like, but well, I understand the author is really not a good fiction writer. 
And it almost spelled out the 5 steps the book is trying to bring as follow:
Step 1: Identify the system bottlenecks
(identify the process which is the slowest pace)
Step 2: Decide how to exploit the bottleneck
(make no time to waste on the process to leverage its usage)
Step 3: Subordinate everything else to the above decision
(follow the pace of bottleneck, checking prioritization to make bottleneck no idle)
Step 4: Elevate the system bottlenecks
(find alternative solution to help leveraging bottlenecks, or increase capacity)
Step 5: If a bottleneck is broken, go back to step 1.
It is true that we really only need a page of paper on the theory and some examples for explanation, then we would be saved to have 337 pages to suffer on bored fiction. Maybe I will suggest them to re-edit the book into something like Who Moved My Cheese, simple and inspiring (to some people) too~
But overall yes, the book is helpful on a set of theories to look at your problem, and to emphasize that we should always look at fundamental rules of things. I do learned something, yet applying on my work requires another round of thinking, and I have 6 others book waiting. 
