The Goal

“Going into the plant is like entering a place where satans and angels have married to make a grey magic.” 

Here, Alex beautifully illustrates his investment in his plant and the manufacturing business in general. Rather than finding the field boring or his job a burden, Alex is genuinely interested in his field, calling the work “magic.” 

“He’s like a general who knows he is losing the battle, but forgets his strategy in his desperation to win.” (

Alex is able to correctly diagnose Bill’s bad management style in this quote. Though Alex has not yet learned what makes a good manager, he can see that Bill relies too heavily on dramatic gestures and shouting. He is so desperate to seem strong and commanding that UniCo ultimately suffers. 

“What I’m telling you is, productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is.” 

Jonah tells Alex this during their chance meeting at the airport. Alex, at this point, thinks productivity is the most important aspect of running his plant, but Jonah knows better. If Alex is not clear about what his goal is, he cannot succeed in meeting it, and thus will never be truly productive. 

“He leans forward as if he’s going to whisper a big secret to me. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he says. ‘A plant where everyone is working all the time is very inefficient.’” 

Here, Jonah challenges yet another of Alex’s closely-held beliefs. Alex believes that if all of his workers are constantly in motion, never idle, that his plant will be efficient. Jonah knows that idle time is often necessary and that giving workers tasks simply for the sake of it will actually diminish productivity. 

“What’s happening isn’t an averaging out of the fluctuations in our various speeds, but an accumulation of the fluctuations. And mostly it’s an accumulation of slowness—because dependency limits the opportunities for higher fluctuations.” 

On his hike with the Boy Scout troop, Alex begins to see Jonah’s idea of statistical fluctuation at work. The boys walking behind Herbie, the slowest scout, are dependent on his pace, and thus their opportunities to speed up are limited. The fluctuations build up and accumulate, getting worse with time. 

“Again, we start walking. But this time, Herbie can really move. Relieved of most of the weight in his pack, it’s as if he’s walking on air. We’re flying now, doing twice the speed as a troop than we did before. And we still stay together. Inventory is down. Throughput is up.” 

Once Alex has placed his “bottleneck” Boy Scout at the front of the troop and divvied up the possessions weighing him down among the other boys, Herbie is able to move much faster. The boys stay together and pick up the pace. On a very small level, Alex can see Jonah’s ideas at work, and working extremely well. 

“We should be trying to optimize the whole system. Some resources have to have more capacity than others. The ones at the end of the line should have more than the ones at the beginning—sometimes a lot more. Am I right?” 

Having learned about statistical fluctuation and dependent events on his hike with the Boy Scout troop, Alex calls Jonah again. He has begun to see his plant as deeply interconnected. To fix or trim each machine in isolation will do nothing. He must reconfigure the entire system, just as he did with the line of boys on the hike. 

“‘Okay, the most important thing is that we have new methods to try,’ I say. ‘Let’s not waste time pinning the blame on bad data. Let’s get to work.’” 

In one of his first meetings with his full advisory team, Alex makes a key decision. Though bad data may have contributed to the plant’s failures, dwelling on these mistakes will do nothing. Alex is clear: what will fix the problem is moving forward with a clear plan and good ideas. 

“The numbers are wrong, not because you have made a calculating error, but because the costs were determined as if these work centers existed in isolation […] I learned not to waste my time checking the numbers—because the numbers were almost always right. However, if I checked the assumptions, they were almost always wrong.” 

Jonah makes an important point to Alex in this quote. Numbers themselves will not lie, but every person brings a set of assumptions to the way they read and interpret data. In order to make progress, Alex must learn to set aside his assumptions or preconceptions, just as Jonah has learned to do. 

“‘Maybe I did the right thing,’ he says, ‘but I had to break all the rules to do it.’”

“‘Then the rules had to be broken,’ I say. ‘And maybe they weren’t good rules to begin with.’”

Alex, once a careful rule-follower, says this to Bob. Though Bob is reluctant to break protocol, Alex has learned from Jonah that in order to affect true change, assumptions must be challenged and bad policies set aside, even if they are the “rules.” Any rule that moves them farther away from their goal does not deserve to be followed.  

“I sit there marveling that we’re going to reduce the efficiency of some operations and make the entire plant more productive. They’d never believe it on the fifteenth floor.” 

After Bob informs Alex that old policies were contributing to the creation of bottlenecks, they discover that by reducing the efficiency of the heat treat furnace, they will actually push more products through, faster. The executives would never believe this, but Alex now knows not to trust outdated modes of calculating efficiency. 

“‘All I’m saying is we ought to throw away for the moment all the pre-conceptions we have about our marriage, and just take a look at how we are right now,’ I tell her. ‘Then we ought to figure out what we want to have happen and go in that direction.’” 

Here, Alex takes Jonah’s ideas and applies them not to his business, but to an interpersonal relationship. He and Julie take stock of their marriage, and Julie admits to having a strict idea of what her marriage should be. Alex knows that these preconceptions do not help a business thrive, and therefore will not help his marriage succeed. He urges Julie to have an open mind and help him come up with a goal, just as Jonah urged him to do at the plant. 

“Throughput is going up as marketing spreads the word about us to other customers. Inventories are a fraction of what they were and still falling. With more business and more parts over which to spread the costs, operating expense is down. We’re making money.” 

After implementing all of Jonah’s ideas, the plant is now thriving. They have discovered extra capacity, and can therefore take on even more business. Alex is well on his way to saving his plant.

“I say an hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour out of the entire system. Hilton says an hour lost at a bottleneck is just an hour lost at that resource. I say an hour saved at a bottleneck is worthless. Hilton says an hour saved at a bottleneck is an hour saved at that resource.” 

Here, Alex illustrates the difference between strict, traditional thinking (Hilton’s) and open-minded, goal-oriented thinking (his). In this quote, he shows how two reasonably intelligent people can look at the same situation and come to two completely different conclusions. 

“[…] we refer to something as common sense only if it is in line with our own intuition […] when we recognize something as common sense, it must be that, at least intuitively, we knew it all along.” 

At this point in the novel, Alex has come to an understanding about the meaning of common sense. Earlier, he was shocked by how simple Jonah’s solutions were. Here, he finally sees that common sense is something that matches up with a person knows to be true, regardless of whether they are aware that they know it. 

“Yeah, Alex. I want to stay here and continue what you’ve started. I want to be the new plant manager. You caused us to change almost every rule in production. You forced us to view production as a means to satisfy sales.” 

Alex receives a wonderful compliment from Bob, as Bob turns down Alex’s offer to join him at the corporate level. Alex’s revolutionary changes have not just affected the plant, but have affected the people working at the plant. Bob, like Lou, Stacey, Ralph, and others, now sees the sense of Jonah’s solutions and has been forced to view the world in a different way. 

“It took me four days to admit that I simply couldn’t find the answer. What I started to realize is that information is something else. Information is the answer to the question asked.” 

Bob recounts his experience of trying to locate the bottlenecks in the plan. Thanks to Jonah’s new strategies, introduced to the plant by Alex, Bob realized that he did not know how to find the answer. This, in turn, caused him to realize that information is more than a list of data points. Information is shaped by the questions we ask. 

“It’s much worse than just wasting time producing useless, pompous reports. This overconcern about the ‘proper way to arrange things’ manifests itself in other harmful ways.” 

Here, Alex argues to his team that reports do not simply waste paper, as they previously thought. Such reports rely on preconceptions and a traditional way of conducting business, both of which impede true innovation.

“That’s why his classification was so powerful. Any other classification that just tries to superimpose some order, any order, on the given facts is useful only in one sense—it gives the ability to present the facts in a sequence, table, or graphs. In other words, helpful is preparing useless, thick reports.” 

Here, Ralph uses the story of Mendeleev and his invention of the periodic table to illustrate what the advisory team already knows: numbers, facts, and reports never tell the whole story. Classification must illuminate rather than simply present information. 

“‘What you are telling us,’ I say slowly, trying to digest it, ‘is that we have switched the scale of importance.’”

In an advisory meeting, Stacey reveals that by reconfiguring the plant and identifying the bottlenecks, the focus has been shifted from decreasing expenses to increasing throughput. They have changed the focus from something reactionary and negative to something positive. Alex realizes that the entire mission of the plant has been altered. 

“Somewhere in the scientific method lies the answer for the needed management techniques.” 

Earlier in the novel, Alex was confused as to why a scientist like Jonah would be working in business. Here, he understands. The way a scientist approaches a problem—questioning, hypothesizing, testing—is just what a manager must do with his team or business. 

“Lou, don’t you see? The real constraints, even in our plant, were not the machines, they were the policies.” 

This is a breakthrough moment for Alex and Lou. While they have been focusing on fixing “bottleneck” machines, Alex realizes that often the greatest impediments to an efficient plant are the policies created, usually, by people like Alex and Lou. To fix the machines is not enough. They must fix the policies that determine how the machines work, as well. 

“First, I think that you need the lightbulb idea, the breakthrough. The management techniques that Jonah talks about must include the ability to trigger such ideas.”

At this point, Alex begins to shift away from his dependence on Jonah. Here, he clearly identifies just what it is about Jonah and his style that is necessary to be an effective manager. Throughout the novel, Alex has had several light bulb moments of his own, but can now see that it is the ability to inspire such moments, rather than experience them, that makes a good manager.