“You say your plant uses robots?” he asks.“In a couple of departments, yes,” I say.“Have they really increased productivity at your plant?”“Sure they have,” I say. “We had—what?” I scan the ceiling for the figure. “I think it was a thirty-six percent improvement in one area.”“Really … thirty-six percent?” asks Jonah. “So your company is making thirty-six percent more money from your plant just from installing some robots? Incredible.”I can’t hold back a smile.“Well…no,” I say. “We all wish it were that easy! But it’s a lot more complicated than that. See, it was just in one department that we had a thirty-six percent improvement.”Jonah looks at his cigar, then extinguishes it in the ashtray.“Then you didn’t really increase productivity,” he says.I feel my smile freeze.“I’m not sure I understand,” I say.Jonah leans forward conspiratorially and says, “Let me ask you something—just between us: Was your plant able to ship even one more product per day as a result of what happened in the department where you installed the robots?”I mumble, “Well, I’d have to check the numbers …”“Did you fire anybody?” he asks.I lean back, looking at him. What the hell does he mean by that?“You mean did we lay anybody off? Because we installed the robots?” I say.“No, we have an understanding with our union that nobody will be laid off because of productivity improvement. We shifted the people to other jobs. Of course, when there’s a business downturn, we lay people off.”“But the robots themselves didn’t reduce your plant’s people expense,” he says.“No,” I admit.“Then, tell me, did your inventories go down?” asks Jonah.I chuckle.“Hey, Jonah, what is this?” I say to him.“Just tell me,” he says. “Did inventories go down?”“Offhand, I have to say I don’t think so. But I’d really have to check the numbers.”“Check your numbers if you’d like,” says Jonah. “But if your inventories haven’t gone down … and your employee expense was not reduced … and if your company isn’t selling more products—which obviously it can’t, if you’re not shipping more of them—then you can’t tell me these robots increased your plant’s productivity.”In the pit of my stomach, I’m getting this feeling like you’d probably have if you were in an elevator and the cable snapped.The Goal by Eliyahu Moshe Goldratt is hokey. It's hammy, cheesy, and schlocky. It is vintage, artisanal eighties cornball slop. It's drowning in awful dime-store, rinky-dink writing. It is prescient. It is full of powerful ideas. It has transformed industries. It is effective. It destroyed Goldratt's career, and then transformed it. It has a dedicated fanbase. It has made him a guru to the industry. But I suspect it has, despite everything, not actually had its ideas applied as much as it should have.If you judge a book by the cover, the cover of my used copy I found in a used book store1 nails the feel.There's the ugly highlights, the gaudy plating of the type, the messy composition, the culty portrait—and yet—I can't look away. There's a certain artfulness to the christmas tree-esque chart taking us towards the north star, The Goal.So, what exactly is The Goal?It is a business thriller novel about a plant manager, Alex 'Al' Rogo of UniCo who needs to save his factory in his hometown of Bearington. But it is a vehicle for what later became Goldratt's Theory of Constraints. This is what the synopsis in my faux-jacket inner fold says.Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal is a gripping novel, which is transforming management thinking throughout the world. [...]It is a book to recommend to your friends in the industry – even to your bosses – but not to your competitors.Okay, so what is actually "the goal" that the title, The Goal is referring to?The goal that The Goal refers to is making money. No, really. The book literally spells this out, several times. The goal is to make money now, and in the future. I appreciate the clarity. There is a whole chapter where Al sits down by the hillside overlooking his soon-to-be-doomed factory as he contemplated the smooth aluminium finish of his Bud, wondering what "the goal" is. The whole chapter is him listing out all possible candidates for what "the goal" is, until he has an a-ha moment where he realises the goal is to make money. This is the conclusion that sets forth the events that save his factory, all sprawled out across its 350-odd pages.Before I forget to mention this—yes there's also terrible romance subplot around the protagonist's failing marriage.This book is a richly cartoonish, warm, and sickly synthetic world. I visualised every scene coloured like an eighties hollywood B-movie. It really adds to the atmosphere where people talk in large meeting round tables where people are smoking cigars, or when the protagonist is fighting with his wife who just got her hair frizzed up. There's the Dilbert-esque boss who has a loose temper, the hardworking inventory woman with glasses, the impatient pot-bellied production manager, the old grumpy chief accountant, and of course our smart and relatable protagonist.It is in this world where Al Rogo serendipitously gets in touch with his former physics teacher, an Israeli man named Jonah, who is mysteriously seen talking to people in expensive suits and getting into limos. Jonah is the principled socratic mentor, sharp and frustrating, but through his methods, catalyses the protagonists to think for themselves and save the factory.It feels like it has no right to work, but it does. Goldratt, through his various characters walk us through powerful systems thinking ideas. There is plenty of literature out there on the Theory of Constraints, and systems thinking as applied to business and management processes out there. But I was amazed to see ideas about the dynamics of systems under various constraints and bottlenecks in here explained this straightforwardly.Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems has been quite an influence for me, it is a book that has similar kinds of ideas, explained elegantly. It is what solidified my core belief that the world is malleable, and full of opportunities. But this book clearly appeals to someone who thinks like me, who likes things formulated in a specific, nerdy and analytical kind of way. It is effective for me. When explained to others, it is often received with some fascination and nodding, but in my career, I have rarely seen it applied directly and effectively. Time and time again, in the software engineering projects I've worked in, people regularly fall into all kinds of systems traps of the kind you'd see in the UniCo factory. Nothing has changed since the eighties.I myself had once given a talk on this topic earlier this year at an AI conference after noticing how ineffectively we are utilising AI agents in our workplaces. I never felt that I was quite effective in getting my message across. It wasn't easy enough. Goldratt is able to exploit the aesthetics of warm, cozy slop, callbacks to familiar cliches, to deliver his theories with clarity and a certain obviousness (so much so, that The Goal has been criticised for being "too obvious"). It is effective, in all sorts of ways that my talk could never be. And all of this is expressed quite earnestly.It was a pretty non-consensus idea, and noted for its clunkiness even at the time of publication. My book has an afterword from Eliyahu himself, reflecting on this book, twenty years after publication. It is a striking essay. The book started out as a way for him to explain the concepts behind a software he was selling. His journey was rough, and in this essay he throws massive shade at his own employees and even his co-author Jeff Cox.Out of desperation, I decided that if conventional presentations were not effective in breaking the dam, maybe a non-conventional approach would. I had an idea: to convey my method through a novel about manufacturing. If people read about lawyers and doctors, why not plant managers? I started to work on The Goal.Nobody liked it. Not even Jeff Cox, the writer that I hired. He hated it to the extent that he refused to share in the royalties and demanded to be paid cash, in full [...]The most opposition came from my own people; most refused to read the drafts. I didn't blame them. I was the chief salesman, the prime presenter, the developer. I was the bottleneck, and here I was, wasting my time writing a novel. No, they didn't like it one bit.I liked it. After thirteen long months of labor, it was finally complete. I was pleased with the results, and thought it was good. The publishers didn't think so. Not the two dozen or so I approached. The most polite rejection I got was from McGraw-Hill: "Dr. Goldratt, if you'd like to write a book about scheduling the shop floor, we'd be delighted to be your publisher. If you want to write a love story, maybe we'll look at it. But a love story about manufacturing?? Forget it! It will never work. We don't even know which shelf to put it on!"Larry Gadd, the owner of North River Press, was the only spot of light, but even he didn't really encourage me either. He claimed that we'd be lucky to sell the first printing (3000 copies), but since he personally liked the book so much, he would print it nevertheless. And he did. We gave one hundred bound galleys as gifts, and the snowball started to roll.It's a compliment for an author when people praise his book. It's an even bigger compliment when they recommend it to others. But the ultimate compliment is people buying the book, in quantities, to give as gifts. And that's exactly what happened. "We will not sell even 3000 copies . . ." What a joke!Our prospect list exploded. It was quite amusing to watch the change in my own people's attitude toward the book. The enthusiastic response of their prospects embarrassed them to the extent that, finally, they read it. Within two months they all had amnesia — each of them claimed that he always was a big supporter of the idea of a novel. I didn't bother to argue.As cheesy as the novel was, it seemed to capture a lot of people's situations.Fan letters started to arrive; letters from plant managers attesting to the realism of the book, "The Goal is written specifically about our plant. We can even tell you the real names of the characters." Some even accused me of hiding in their factory.It wasn't long before the letters started to detail actual results. One plant manager wrote, "Your book is not a novel anymore — now it's a documentary. We followed Alex Rogo's actions to the letter and we replicated his results exactly. Currently, the only difference between your book and my reality is that my wife didn't come back yet." Many letters included an invitation to come and visit, which I sometimes did.After this book took off, Goldratt got fired from his job, because people realised that they could apply his ideas without needing his software, something he conceded in this essay. There's something really ironic about the fact that Goldratt didn't make his company achieve The Goal, which, might I remind you in case you have forgotten is: to make money, now and in the future. I can't help but wonder. Has this book changed me? Will I be more of a systems thinker now? I'm not sure. But I know now, that persuasion can take many forms, and sometimes it's okay to be completely hokey, completely unserious, if it means I can be effective and reach more people.The Bookhive on Church Street is a gem. ↩