Order The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

Ever wonder why the best laid process improvement efforts failed to yield their expected results? In this book, Eliyahu M.Goldratt and Jeff Cox provide both an explanation as to why these efforts fail, and how & where to correctly focus one's improvement activities in the first place. Called the Theory of Constraints (TOC), the authors point out that all processes constitute an integrated system which has one, maybe two constraints at most. Improvement efforts need to be focused on the system constraint in order to achieve dramatic process improvements (i.e., reduced cycle times, less waste, more productivity, etc.). Changes elsewhere in the system (i.e., on non-constraints) result in essentially no improvement in the system's overall performance.
All systems have constraints. They can not be eliminated, only moved elsewhere in the system. Strangely, one of the most common constraint sources the author points out are the very policies/decisions that are put into place by an organization's management because they fail to consider their effects on the system constraint's performance.
This may seem obvious and "common sense", but the world is full of examples proving this to be typically a very "uncommon" way for most people to think and act. In The Goal, Goldratt & Cox show the primary force influencing people to do "wrong things right" ...measurement systems that focus one's attention primarily on localized improvements.
Rooted in modern managerial accounting practices, managers are rewarded (evaluated) for local process improvements/attaining local goals, thereby shifting their focus away from organizational level goals to their own individual group's needs. While senior management's thinking is that an improvement anywhere adds up to an improvement for the whole system, this ignores the real integrated nature of the organization (they are not a series of independent entities). Like a chain, therefore, improvements anywhere but at the weakest link does nothing to improve the chain's overall strength.
One of the things that makes this book unique from others is it's approach to educating the reader. Preferring the Socratic method of learning, the authors have structured their material into a story about a manufacturing company that needs to make immediate and dramatic improvements within a very short time frame. While making for one of the easiest "text books" to read, the reader has to be careful not to get caught up in the "story", as you will miss the underlying messages.
Each chapter is filled with useful knowledge and solutions that can be extracted and applied. (I continue to find "new" things each time I re-read it.) Some are subtle changes to long standing process related definitions, but now show how the application of the TOC principles would change one's decision making approach. How typical managerial accounting can lead one's decision making astray is one of the author's favorite "targets".Get more detail about The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement.