Analysis Of The Book 'The Goal'

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Introduction: In the book The Goal written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox the authors introduce us to the main character Alex who is a manager at a plant. The problem that Alex is faced with at the Plant is that somewhere in the production line there is a problem that is causing delays in shipments to go out of the facility. Mr. Peach who is the vice president is threatening to shut the plant down if Alex cannot figure out what the why shipments are going out late to their clients. When reading the book Alex learns a lot about decision making and how to solve problems to help his plant be successful so Mr. Peach does not have to shut it down. The three key points in the book is to look at the problem as a whole and figure out a solution, …show more content…

When Alex first learns that he only has 3 months to fix the problem at the plant he does not know where to begin. In chapter 5 Alex starts to solve the problem by understanding what the goal is. Alex realizes that the goal of the plant was to “make money” (Goldratt). He gets so caught up in this that he forget to look at the whole picture of what is going wrong in the plant. Alex does not know how to implement the goal of the company so he asks Jonah for his input and Jonah tells him that the three criteria to help implement the goal of the company is “Throughput, inventory, and optimal expense” (Goldratt, pg. 59). At this point in the book I believe that Alex starts to see a relationship that the problems the companies is faced with is a chain reaction. Multiple actions will cause create a problem. In the Organizational Behaviors text book written by Cohen et al he talks about the decision process in the NASA Challenger Launch and how NASA was faced with obstacles which in turn caused the death of their astronauts. Cohen et al talks about how for the Challenger Launch NASA kept having to …show more content…

Alex does a great job of showing how important this is in the decision making process. The most import relationship Alex has is with Jonah. Jonah is always helping Alex by giving him advice and asking Alex questions to help him to solve problems in a new way. In chapter 19 Jonah visits the plant and is talking to Alex and the other coworkers about quality control. Alex is confused, but with the help of Jonah he understands how to solve the problem. “Do you realize what the rejection by Q.C. has done to you? Ask Jonah … It means we have to scrap about a hundred parts, says Bob No think again says Jonah… We Lost time on the bottlenecks I say (Goldratt, pg. 155) These relationship really help Alex to understand what is going on in the plant. This shows just how important decision making and building relationship is because if a manager cannot figure out how to solve a problem you might know someone who can help out. Building relationships is very important

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