Genre: Business/Fiction
Date of Publication: 1984 (No specific date could be found.)
Memorable quotation: “If I were to just tell you the answers I know,
all you would get is an earful of advice. But if you discover the answers
for yourself, then you own those answers. They’ll be yours to keep, and
you’ll believe in them so much more because you found them yourself.” (pg. 269)
If you liked these, you’ll like this: Who
Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson and The
Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
Lasting
Impression: This is a must read for
anyone interested in/involved with economics, business, or management for the
business strategies that are discussed. For everyone else, the growth and
problems of Al Rogo are things that anyone can relate to.
Storyline: A
Pace of Story: B+
Characters: A
Ending: A+
Overall Grade: A
I recently
changed careers and started a new job, in advertising (Hooray!) so my new boss
recommended I read this novel to understand more about the business and how to
succeed, so although this wouldn’t have been my first choice of a novel, I
definitely gained perspective from it.
Here’s the
premise: What would you do if your manager told you one morning that your division
of a manufacturing plant has not been making money for so long time that if
things didn’t pick up in three months time, your division will be shut
down? This is the situation Al Rogo is
faced with, and if that isn’t hard enough to deal with, his marriage is
crumbling as well. With the help of his
old physics teacher, Jonah, Rogo begins a journey of not only a re-evaluation
of everything he thought he knew about business but also how to manage his time
better with his family.
The book
focuses on the ideas of throughput, bottlenecks, and ROI (just to name a few)
and for those who feel daunted by those terms (like I did), Goldratt writes in
a way that is easy to understand, even though at times I was bored by the
amount of business terminology used in certain scenarios.
What annoyed
me the most about the novel was how it was described on the jacket. It was
stated that this would be a “thriller” and it was a “compulsive” read. For a
reader like me, these words made me think of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (maybe for business people, this is a thriller)
but when I read it, I had to push myself at times to get through the sections
that went deep into the ethics of business.
When I was done with the book, my boss
asked me what I got out of it, and I told him some of the terms I remembered
and how the goal of The Goal is to
make money. He nodded in agreement with everything I said but stated when I was
done, “Einstein. Albert Einstein said a
very important quotation that Rogo followed unknowingly and I want you to
remember it. If you do, you will be successful here. The quote is, ‘I don’t need to know
everything; I just to know where to find it when I need it.’ ”
That's exactly what
Rogo did; when he didn’t know the answer, he went to Jonah for help and soon realized that the
goal of any business is what the book said, to make money, but it really is
more than that. The goal is to admit you can't know everything so it is important to have the resources that can lead you to the answer.
