The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox
“The Goal” is as it vividly explains, is a book on achieving goals. Eliyahu Goldratt, world famous Israeli physicist turned business consultant, the creator of the “Theory of constraints”, in his work “The Goal”, explains a lot about managerial skills, to achieve higher productivity and efficiency, in a simple and lucid manner.
Goldratt takes a very practical example of today’s world, an Engineer with an MBA degree, Mr. Alex Rogo, as his protagonist and his struggle to get a loss making company to a profit making one along with his family in the back-ground, obviously an important one, to explain the drudgeries of a manufacturing engineer’s life. Goldratt explains several management skills to be inherited in any professional’s life with ease, in this thought provoking novel based management textbook. The ideas expressed in this book, although difficult to be digested normally, are easily conceptualized in the form of a novel, which any professional can easily relate to.
The book mainly talks about the protagonist, Alex, his superiors and his team along with his management Guru, Jonah, who changes the whole perspective of Alex’s life with his simple messages, opens Alex to brand new world of bottlenecks, variability, etc. and their effects in the working of any manufacturing firm.
Alex is the Plant Manager of a division of Unico, which is a rather loss making plant, and having a lot of trouble mainly as far as its with its productivity and meeting with the deadlines was concerned.
This book is important to business students because it shows that even the most seasoned executive runs into unexpected challenges and can find themselves in uncharted territory. Jim Barton’s experiences and lessons can be lessons for anyone. Any employee, whether they are support staff or a top executive, should always maintain an open mind and be ready to learn from a situation or the people around them at any time.
The Goal is a story about overcoming manufacturing problems that is told through the eyes of a plant manager, Alex Rojo. Alex arrives to work one morning only to discover the division vice-president, Bill Peach, showed up unannounced to see the status of a specific customer order number, discovered the order was incomplete, barked orders at employees to assemble the products, and finally informed Mr. Rojo he has only three months to improve his plant's performance before it's closed because the plant cannot get orders out the door on time. In fact, the order Bill investigated was already seven weeks late and the product not even assembled. After Bill departs, Alex heads to the floor to discover Bill's unexpected arrival has created more problems. The master machinest Bill yelled at before Mr. Rojo arrived quit but only after setting up a machine to complete the seven-week-late order that Bill demanded be shipped out today. The machinest, however, forgot to tighten two adjustment nuts on the machine so several parts must be scrapped, but even worse is that the machine, which just so happens to be the only one of its kind in the plant, is broken.
The main character of the book is Alex Rogo, a plant manager working in the UniCo Manufacturing Corporation, located in a declining industrial town. He is an industrial engineer with an MBA. Alex manages the injection molding manufacturing part of the plant. According to the book, He is ideal for the job but if he does not learn how to run his plant efficiently he wont make any money. Alex
Many people believe that in order to succeed in a business that is having difficulties, it is important to focus on a particular area in order to be better productive in each of them, and be able to reach the goal. Instead, Goldratt and Jonah demonstrates that is important to focus on the company as a whole, but at the same time, it shows that it is incorrectly to only focus in an specific manufacturing department, or one plant, or a department within the plant, because people should not be concerned in local optimums.
Robbins, S. P., & Coulter, M. (2007). Management (9th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
The set goals should also be those that are favourable to the workers, as well as the management team as a whole. This is to ensure that they can be met easily without much difficulties involved.
The book also discussed the family life of Alex which went up and down because his job took most of time and kept him away from them.
The theory of goal setting was developed by Edward Locke and Gary Latham (1990) and states that there is a direct relationship between the setting of specific high goals and task performance. A higher degree of employee performance is obtained when specific goals are set compared to the performance achieved when employees are simply told to do their best (Latham & Locke, 2007). These findings have helped shape leadership styles and improve employee performance and job satisfaction (Posthuma & Al-Riyami, 2012).
Robbins, S.P., & Coulter, M. (2009). Management (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
When reading the book The Goal written by Eliyahu Goldratt, there were many lessons that I learned in order to have a clear and concise understanding of a positive level of productivity in a company. To have a positive level of productivity there are may components that are taken into consideration. Understanding what it actually means to be productive and how to increase the level of productivity by knowing the actual goal of the company that is trying to be reached and the components that go into the process of being productive. There are many factors that contribute to the level of productivity and being able to identify these factors is the key ingredient to having a successful level of productivity.
Robbins, S. P., & Coulter. M. (2014). Management (12th ed.). Retrieved from: Colorado Technical University eBook Collection database.
Over 50 years ago, English-speaking managers were directly introduced to Henry Fayol’s theory in management. His treatise, General and Industrial Management (1949), has had a great effect on managers and the practice of management around the world. However, 24 years after the English translation of Fayol, Henri Mintzberg in the Nature of Managerial Work (1973) developed another theory and stated that Fayol’s work was just “folklores”.
The main character in the book name is Tom, he is a recently-hired mid to upper level manager at the company called Zagrum. Within the book Tom mainly interacts with two others– Bud, his boss who is an executive vice president of the company, and Kate, the president of Zagrum’s. Both Kate and Bud take time out of their
The managers must set organizational goals aligned with the company mission. This will provide a strategy for achieving those goals. For example, planning can be seen at every level such as creating goals for sales as well as for the customer experience (Higgins, 1994).
However, after reviewing our interview transcripts, and considering my peer’s issue, I believe that Goal Setting Theory would be the most applicable theory for solving my peer’s problem. In 1960s, Edwin A. Locke first proposed this theory, and then this theory has been developed. Locke and Latham referred (1990) that goal specificity is positively related to subsequent performance, and many following studies also indicate that there are a high correlation between these two variables.