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.
Themes
Goals
Alex’s first task, after his chance meeting with Jonah at the airport, is to determine the “goal” of a manufacturing organization. Though Alex is sure that the goal is to produce products, Jonah is firm that Alex is wrong. As this is his first task, the concept of goals and identifying goals flows throughout the novel. Alex’s first major turning point comes when he discovers the real goal of his plant. He has abandoned the division meeting with Bill, bought a pizza and a six pack, and is staring out at the landscape in despair. By any standards, he is not acting like a responsible manager, and it is easy to imagine Alex giving up at this point. Yet, it is in this moment that Alex identifies the goal: “The company exists to make money” (40). Once the goal has been identified, Alex is re-energized, throwing all his time and effort into explaining the goal to his advisory team and reconfiguring his plant to meet that goal.
The fact that Alex has the epiphanies that streamline company operations and turn his plant around while engaged in recreational activities (i.e., eating lunch on a cliff, hiking with his son, talking with his wife, etc.) show that “productivity” doesn’t always look the way we expect. This echoes Jonah’s observation that having every worker operate at 100% capacity all the time is not actually most efficient for the company. Energy and time working for what seems important but does not adhere to the overall goal actually costs the company money. Therefore, worker’s idle time may not be wasted time.
The concept of goals also makes an appearance in Alex’s personal life. After Julie leaves him, he meets with her to discuss the future of their marriage. Just as Jonah once challenged him to identify the goal of a business, he asks Julie what the goal of a marriage is. Just like Alex, she is dismissive of the question. “When you’re married, you’re just married. There is no goal” (226), she tells him. Alex refuses to let her off the hook with that answer. He suggests that they approach fixing their marriage the way he has approached fixing the plant: by identifying the goal (to make each other happy) and to take clear steps to reach that goal.
When Alex’s position changes, so does his goal. When Bill offers him the vice presidency of the division, Alex must figure out how to be an effective manager. Once again, he returns to square one: the goal. This time, with the help of his team, he must identify the goal of an organization, rather than a business. The goal is the “process of ongoing improvement” (296). It is clear that to Goldratt, every problem, from business to personal, can be solved by first identifying the goal.
This goal-oriented philosophy has had far-reaching implications not only in the private sector but also in education. Wiggins and McTighe developed “backwards design” (Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. ASCD, 2005), where teachers first identify the standards students are supposed to achieve, then develop the target for the assignment or lesson, then devise the assessment to display the target, then create the activities to build the necessary skills. The steps in this streamlined process mirror The Goal and show that Goldratt’s theories can be applied not only in business but other concentrations as well.
Perceptions, Assumptions, and “The Way It’s Always Been”
A major through-line in The Goal is the dismantling of assumptions and perceptions and the refusal to continue with tradition for tradition’s sake. When Jonah first presents his ideas to Alex, Alex is reluctant to hear them and quick to dismiss them because they do not fall in line with what he has been taught. “What’s wrong with my thinking?” (31), he demands of Jonah. “It’s no different from the thinking of most other managers” (31). Jonah agrees with him—that’s precisely the problem. Alex like everyone else has “accepted so many things without question” (31). As Alex begins to appreciate Jonah’s wisdom and unique perspective, he begins to question his own assumptions about how a plant should be run and challenges his advisory team to do the same. This process is painful, particularly for Lou and Bob, who are set in their ways and resistant to change. After Jonah personally visits the plant, the whole team begins to set aside their preconceptions about efficiency and productivity.
Lou and Bob, once the most vocal critics of Alex’s revolutionary new measures, go as far as to help conceal the changes Alex is making from the UniCo executives, who would crack down on any deviation from the accepted standards and procedures. When Hilton Smyth gets wind of Lou’s new accounting methods, he tattles to the corporate office, who call Lou and Alex in. “This is highly irregular” (250), one executive says, with the clear implication that anything irregular must be bad, regardless of the results it produces. “We have to observe standard policy” (250). Lou and Alex attempt to explain, but their reasoning falls on deaf ears. Alex notes that, “All they know is their accounting standards” (250).
Alex comes to see that perhaps the greatest impediment to the plant itself is the use of policies that work in theory but not reality and a refusal to retire them. Hilton Smyth, clearly intended to be Alex’s literary foil, is especially keen to do things by the book, thwarting many of Alex good measures because they are new and unproved. Towards the end of the novel, Alex remarks to Lou that more than the physical setup of the plant, what they really changed were “The measurements, the policies, the procedures […] The real constraints, even in our plant, were not the machines, they were the policies” (334). This is not to say that Alex has become completely enlightened. Like anyone else, he still has preconceptions. When he learns that Julie is reading Socratic dialogues, he asks why. Aren’t they boring? Alex, she says, “your perceptions are all wrong, it’s not at all like you think” (317).
Innovation and Expectations
In order for the plant to make money, or achieve its goal, its operations needed to change in unusual, unique, and innovative ways. Einstein said the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome, and yet this is precisely what the “old guard,” represented by Hilton Smyth and initially Bill Peach and Bob Donovan, do. Doing things in a different way is risky—success is not guaranteed, which Is likely to unnerve shareholders. Yet, it is the only way to properly diagnose and remedy the problem.
At the same time, the average reader is likely uncomfortable with Alex allowing doctored numbers to appease the higher-ups in the company while he innovates procedures. This feels immoral, even though it’s clear that the malfeasance is for the greater good. Just as weighing an item in kilos rather than pounds makes it seem lighter because the number is lower, the reader feels a sense of deceit in measuring the plant’s success by different means, even if the number is factually correct. Goldratt dismisses these reservations as traditionalist and anti-innovative, and indeed innovation necessitates reimagining old ideas. While risky, innovation is necessary to improve procedures.
The counterintuitive measures Goldratt uses to measure the plant’s profits challenge traditional expectation of what constitutes success. One would imagine that creating more products creates more money for the company, and that having a greater inventory would lead to greater output and therefore greater profit. This book shows that this is not the case, and profit is determined by productivity. Also, productivity doesn’t always look the way we expect. Alex’s most productive moments are when he’s recreating by himself or with others, and the new machine that should be an asset for the company creates a bottleneck. Alex’s successful completion of the 1000 quantity order in installments reminds the reader that customer happiness is dependent on adjusting expectations to meet reality.
