The goal
Alex Rogo is the manager of a failing manufacturing plant who receives an ultimatum from corporate headquarters: Turn the situation around in three months or the plant will be scrapped. With help from a mysterious mentor, Rogo discovers a revolutionary new way to do business—a way for people in any field of endeavor to increase productivity, profitability, and personal fulfillment. A business book disguised as a novel, a love story about the manufacturing process, and an exhilarating adventure in human potential, The Goal is changing how America does business. First published in 1984, it became an underground bestseller; today it's used by thousands of companies and taught in hundreds of business schools. Includes the author's personal story, "My Saga." This third edition includes case study interviews. Professional readers recreate interviews that David Whitford, Editor at Large with Fortune Small Business, conducts with the author Eli Goldratt and with business professionals from General Motors, Thomson-Shore, Security Federal Banks and others who put the principles of The Goal into action
Stats for nerds
85recommend
154mentions
120people
2008–2026years
67% recommend30% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I'd recommend those employers to read "The Goal" from Eliyahu M. Goldratt.
By not limiting WIP they are actually making their employees less efficient.
- If you think a department or individual working 10% faster makes a company 10% more productive, you’re almost certainly wrong.
Productivity only improves if the change increases revenue or reduces costs. And that rarely happens unless you improve the actual bottleneck of the organization.
To understand why, I recommend the book The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox.
- One of the clearest thinkers I had the privilege of knowing was Dr. Eli Goldratt author of Theory of Constraints.
Fortunately for us he defined as his life's mission to teach the world to think clearly.
So I suggest you start with three of his books: The Goal, Is not luck and The Choice. After trat read "The thinking Processes".
Apart from the theory of Constraints literature you can study system dynamics. And if you like programming then "Introduction to NetLogo" is great at both.
If you don't like programming then Zenge's the "Fifth Discipline" is a great intro to system dynamics.
- Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by ET Jaynes was the book that made statistics and probability theory finally make sense to me. Before reading this book, I was already familiar with Bayesian probability, having finished (among other books) The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, but Jaynes took everything to a whole new level. Probability is not an objective measure of likelihood—it is a subjective measure of incomplete information. This seems like a small shift in perspective, but it is much more profound than that, and you have to read the book to understand it.
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M Goldratt opened my eyes to process optimization. It is nominally about process optimization in a manufacturing plant, but so many of the lessons can be applied to other domains, such as software development. (And also about life in general, how to think about what matters and what doesn't.) It is a bit dated now; for example The Principles of Product Development Flow offers a much more systematic treatment of the topic. But I think The Goal remains the best intro to process and systems thinking.
- Snark aside, this is the main topic of Eli Goldratt's "The Goal" - one of my favourite books. Output of the business is constrained by some bottleneck. Improving efficiency away from the bottleneck is just waste. Said differently, enhancing individual productivity has no effect on the business output unless doing so elevates the bottleneck. Sadly, most business don't know what their constraints are or are otherwise blocked from elevating them due to politics and other factors.
- The Goal and It's not luck by Goldratt.
Showed a better way to manage anything in particular ourselves.
Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl even in the darkest of times we kind find Meaning.
A Guide to the good life. The stoics found a way to handle our human experience 2500 years ago.
The mythical man month by Brooks. Everything we struggle with in software development we have been fighting since the 70s.
