53 pages • 1 hour read
Eliyahu M. GoldrattThe Goal
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Alex remembers when he received the cigar he finds in his pocket. Two weeks earlier, he was travelling to Chicago for a corporate meeting when he ran into Jonah, an old professor of his, in the airport lounge. Jonah is a physicist by training, but now works “in the science of organizations” (29). He and Alex begin to talk about the use of robots at Alex’s plant. Though Alex insists that robots have increased the plant’s efficiency, Jonah is skeptical. He correctly guesses that most of the plant’s orders are shipped late and that its inventories are too high. Alex walks Jonah to his plane, continuing to pick his brain about why his plant is so inefficient. Jonah remarks that if Alex were to consider what it truly means to be efficient, his plant would benefit. He asks Alex what it means to be productive and agrees with Alex’s answer that it means “accomplishing something” (31), but only “in terms of goals” (31). “‘Productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is’” (32), Jonah tells Alex, and encourages him to identify the goal of his plant. Alex guesses greater efficiency, to produce products, and power, but Jonah dismisses all of these. He tells Alex to call him once he’s figured out the real goal.
Chapter 5 Summary
Back at the early morning meeting, Alex thinks about his conversation with Jonah. He still doesn’t know what the goal is and grows frustrated with the meeting’s agenda. “Does anyone genuinely know what we’re doing?” (34), he wonders. He decides that this meeting isn’t going to “help anybody” (35) or make his plant more efficient or effective, so he packs up his things and leaves, much to the shock of his coworkers. He knows Bill may fire him for walking out, but he doesn’t care. Alex drives around, taking advantage of the nice day. He picks up a pizza and a six pack and sits at a lookout point, eating, drinking, and thinking about Jonah and the goal. He dismisses cost-effective purchasing, providing jobs, and quality, but eventually has a light bulb moment: “The company exists to make money” (40). The goal of his plant is to turn a profit. To save the plant, he realizes, he must “make the plant make money for UniCo” (41).
Chapter 6 Summary
Alex arrives back at work. With his new goal in mind, he becomes angry when he sees some workers are idle, reading the newspaper. He orders their supervisor to find something for them to do or to loan them out to another department. Despite this, Alex quickly realizes that “idle people here are the exception…And we’re not making money” (43). He calls his plant controller, Lou, into his office. He asks Lou if the goal of the company is to make money, and Lou agrees that it is. Alex asks Lou for measurements to help determine whether the plant is meeting that goal, and Lou tells him that he would need to know the total profit, the total investment, and the amount of cash flow. Alex reveals that the plant is in deep trouble, and offers Lou early retirement, but Lou rejects it. Lou’s ideas for helping the plant mainly involve complaints about the workers’ union, and Alex wonders why, with so many smart people working there, the plant is doing so badly.
Later, alone in his office, Alex comes up with a more complete goal: “to make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow” (49). He calls home to discover that Julie is angry; Alex has forgotten their date night again.
Chapter 7 Summary
Alex returns home to find his young daughter, Sharon, up much past her bedtime. She shows him her stellar report card, and Alex notes the irony that his “kid is getting A’s in second grade while I’m flunking out of business” (53). He considers giving up his new idea of “the goal”—if no one else is doing it, why should he? He debates the merits of finding a new job in a new town but can’t shake the idea that he’d be “running away” (54). He realizes that the only tools he has to work with are his own eyes, ears, and mind: “I am all that I have” (54). He decides to find Jonah again.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
In this section, Alex finds his preconceptions rocked by his chance meeting with Jonah. Because this meeting takes place two weeks before the book begins, Alex does not yet know that his plant and his job are in danger. He is eager to discuss his plant’s “more efficient” robots with Jonah, his old professor. When Jonah challenges Alex’s assumption that the robots lead to greater efficiency, Alex does not know how to respond. Of course the robots are efficient—his graphs, charts, and numbers say so. As a plant manager, Alex has become reliant on numbers and reports to determine the state of his company, but Jonah, without any sort of data at all, is able to correctly guess that Alex’s plant is overrun with inventory and late on most of their orders. “You think you’re running an efficient plant…but your thinking is wrong” (30), Jonah tells Alex. This will be a recurring point throughout The Goal: one must challenge one’s preconceived notions and ingrained modes of thinking to see the truth of the matter. Instead of relying on what numbers tell us should be the case, we need to experience the organization from top to bottom to understand why and how productivity is enhanced or halted.
An excellent example of this is how long it takes Alex to figure out what Jonah means by the “real” goal. Because Alex, as a plant manager, has so many different measurements and departmental needs to consider, he finds it extremely difficult to pinpoint one, overarching goal for the plant. “We do a lot of things in the course of daily operations, and they’re all important…or we wouldn’t do them” (37), he tells himself. In this statement alone, Alex is assuming several things: that the various things he does in daily operation are not connected, that they are all equally important, and if they weren’t important, they wouldn’t do them. When talking to the plant controller, Lou, and later to Eddie, a shift supervisor, Alex comes to see that each person’s preconceptions blind them to the simple, obvious factors at work in the plant’s problems. Lou, as plant controller, frequently engages with the workers’ union and is content to lay the blame at their door. For Eddie, who knows “scrap factors…run times…shipping dates” (51), there’s “only a vague association between what happens on his shift and how much money the company makes” (51). Only when Alex puts aside his preconceptions is he able to identify the goal of the plant—and is shocked by how simple it seems.
