The Goal
A novel about a factory that is secretly the best book on finding your bottleneck.
- Author
- Eliyahu M. Goldratt
- Year
- 1984
The novel format felt unnecessary at first, then I understood: if it had explained the theory of constraints with a diagram I would have forgotten it, and because it told a story I did not.
The one-sentence summary is that every improvement outside the bottleneck is waste. I thought I knew this, and in practice I kept optimising things that were not the bottleneck.
The factory examples do not map onto software directly; you have to do the translation yourself.