There are books that leave a lasting impression because they confirm what we already think, and then there are those that force us to think differently, to question truths we believe to be set in stone. The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt, falls into the second category.
But before I go any further, let me tell you that I have a rather unusual history with this book. When I was a business school student specializing in the application of new technologies to the functioning of businesses and management (it was called “e-management” at the time), everyone advised me to choose the “industrial management” option. The professor was said to be captivating and the subject matter very interesting.
So I followed the vox populi and was not disappointed. So much so that at one point I seriously considered changing tack and moving into industry, a field in which my school also had renowned MBAs. In the end, that didn’t happen (and it’s perhaps my only regret in my professional life), but this subject and this teacher left an indelible mark on me (Mr. Frédéric Dalsace, if you’re reading this more than 20 years later…).
As we were chatting at the end of a class, he gave me a book recommendation for the holidays: The Goal (I think you guessed that one). He said, basically, “You’ll see, it fits with your rather systemic way of thinking, and it’s an industrial love story that will be a change from traditional management books”. He was absolutely right.
So now you understand why I have repeatedly referred to the theory of constraints and Goldratt in certain articles, realizing that the concept is so powerful that it goes far beyond the industrial world, as I realized when I was working extensively on topics related to employee collaboration and its ROI, and even today on AI and its supposed productivity gains (Local optimum vs. global optimum and the theory of constraints: why your productivity gains sometimes serve no purpose and The great illusion of technological productivity gains (including AI)).
But Goldratt himself has written other books in which he adapts “TOC” to the world of knowledge workers and project management, and I will have the opportunity to discuss this further in future articles. In any case, it is certain that, 20 years later, as a manager and executive, this is the book that has inspired me the most when it comes to talking about the productivity of my teams, how to optimize it, and where to look for problems (much more often in the system than in people). And that running a business with accounting indicators is sometimes the best way to drive it into the ground.
That’s where I learned that you can work hard, produce a lot, have all your indicators in the green, and still not make any progress, or even lose money. Because what really matters is not the activity, but the flow. Not the occupation of machines and people, but the creation of value. If expressions such as “game changer” or “eye opener” can be applied to a book, it is this one.
In short :
- The book “The Goal” proposes a new way of thinking about organizations, viewing them as systems to be optimized as a whole rather than on a job-by-job basis.
- It warns against preconceived notions about productivity and performance, emphasizing that danger often comes from what we think we know.
- The suggested approach is to identify the main constraint in the system, relieve it, and think in terms of flows rather than isolated tasks.
- Organizational improvement is based on doing what is essential better, not simply doing more.
- This thinking applies equally to factories and to sectors where work is less visible, particularly knowledge-based professions that have yet to be significantly transformed by systemic optimization approaches.
Who is Eliyahu Goldratt?
Eliyahu M. Goldratt was an Israeli physicist who became a management thinker. His scientific background is evident throughout his work: logical rigor, search for root causes, rejection of superficial solutions… He developed the Theory of Constraints in the 1980s and first applied it to the industrial world before gradually extending it to other fields. He is also the author of several books that extend TOC to project management (Critical Chain), services, and decision-making systems. We will return to this in other articles.
A management lesson in the form of a novel
The Goal is therefore a book unlike any other. It is neither a manual nor a theoretical essay, but a novel, and that is precisely what makes it so effective. By following the story of Alex Rogo, a factory manager faced with the threat of his site closing, we learn, we think along with him, we follow an intellectual journey, we get angry at Jonah, the consultant who insists on asking questions without giving any answers but seems to have understood everything before anyone else.
We also learn on a more personal level that spending your life at the office looking for solutions can have terrible consequences elsewhere, and that stepping outside the workplace can help you find solutions you couldn’t find there. It was while accompanying his son on a Boy Scout outing that Alex Rogo found the solution to a major problem at his factory.
In short, we move away from the abstract model and into real life, where indicators don’t tell the whole story, where we fight to deliver, to keep jobs, to (re)give meaning.
Throughout the book, Goldratt introduces his central theory: the Theory of Constraints (TOC). In any system, there is a major constraint, a bottleneck, that limits its overall performance. Until this constraint is identified and addressed, all efforts to improve elsewhere are useless, even counterproductive. It’s simple but incredibly effective.
The book challenges a dominant Taylorist view: the idea that if every department, every team, and every position is functioning well, the entire organization will do well. However, as we see very clearly in The Goal, a factory can be running at full capacity, its machines can be used 100% of the time, its employees can be overwhelmed, and yet losses can still accumulate. The reason is simple: by trying too hard to optimize locally, you end up jamming the system.
Goldratt counters this logic with a powerful idea: overall performance is measured in terms of flow, not in terms of resource utilization, and I have a feeling that this concept is going to come back into fashion, at least in the world of knowledge work, when we see what businesses are doing to get the most out of AI (Thinking of work as a flow: appealing, but is it realistic?). What matters is not how much we produce, but how much we deliver. Not how busy we are, but how much we advance what is valuable. And this is where OCD can give you a headache: a position or resource may seem underutilized, yet be key to ensuring the smooth running of the whole, and it is its underutilization that makes you money (or stops you from losing it). Conversely, an overused resource can become a bottleneck that prevents any progress.
Rethinking productivity
What I personally took away from The Goal when I first read it was an important lesson about productivity, even though I learned many other things when I reread it several times, particularly the latest versions enriched with the author’s comments on the failure or over-functioning of TOC in certain organizations, but we will come back to that in due course.
Productivity is often considered the be-all and end-all of an organization’s performance, and is sometimes mistakenly held up as a key indicator. In fact, we often confuse local productivity, that of a link in a chain, with the performance of that chain, i.e., the business. In fact, work is a flow, with dependencies, and cost accounting, on which a large part of management decisions are based, is totally unsuitable for capturing the dynamics of flows. It values use but not “useful” use, which alone contributes to value. It measures costs but not the ability to create value or how this is done and, above all, it favors local trade-offs, which are often contrary to the interests of the whole.
This interpretive framework changes many things and is valuable far beyond factories. I have often used TOC to think about knowledge work because, in fact, the theory of constraints applies whenever there are dependencies or interdependencies in production. I had already noticed this a few years ago, when I was dealing with many topics related to collaboration: cross-functional projects, validation chains, multiple interactions between specialists. The same obstacles arise: you may have a highly efficient, highly responsive individual or team that produces a lot, yet nothing really moves forward because another department is overwhelmed, because the expected decision is not forthcoming, because a downstream process is blocking everything. The problem is not individual energy but collective consistency, and it is often a small, inconspicuous, undervalued link that determines the performance of the whole.
This is a very relevant insight today, at a time when there is increasing talk of artificial intelligence as a lever for productivity. Yes, employees will be faster, produce more, and automate certain tasks, but this in no way guarantees an overall increase in the business’s performance. Because if the processes remain the same, if bottlenecks are not addressed, if decisions remain slow or poorly synchronized, the gains will be absorbed, diluted, or lost. AI can speed up a workflow, but it cannot fix a disorganized organization and may even, in some cases, amplify imbalances.
I can give you 10 use cases where, if AI increases the productivity of every employee involved except one, you will not earn a penny more and may even lose money.
And that may be one of Goldratt’s most unsettling lessons: revenue is not a direct function of productivity: an organization can produce much more and much faster without earning more. Production only has value if it contributes to useful throughput, according to Goldratt, and if this flow is limited by the constraints of the system, not by the sum of individual efforts. Ultimately, the constraint may even lie outside your business: if the market cannot absorb your productivity gains, they are of no use to you and may even cost you money (Technologies sell productivity, but businesses want revenue and Local optimum vs. global optimum and the theory of constraints: why your productivity gains sometimes serve no purpose).
This forces us to look beyond the number of units produced or utilization rates and ask ourselves one question: does what we are doing, here and now, really contribute to advancing what has value (in other words, something that will definitely be billed)?
Think in terms of flow, act as a system
What Goldratt proposes is therefore a kind of paradigm shift. It is not a question of adding a new method or a new tool, but of changing focus. We must accept that value is created not by the sum of individual performances, but by the system’s ability to function smoothly and consistently. This obviously requires a different way of managing, deciding, and collaborating.
That is why, years later, The Goal remains a very modern text, because it asks the right questions: What is blocking progress? What creates value? Who should adapt to whom? Why do we do what we do? It does not provide ready-made answers, but it forces us to look at the organization not as a sum of functions, but as a living system, where each part only has meaning in relation to the whole.
It is this vision that I retain and continue to use, even today, to think about transformations, projects, and teams. Because, ultimately, in any organization, there is always a constraint, and it is from this constraint that everything can begin to change.
Bottom Line
The Goal is a book that should act as a wake-up call. It teaches us that organizations are not machines to be optimized position by position, but systems to be understood as a whole. It reminds us that the greatest danger comes not from what we don’t know, but from what we think we know about productivity, performance, costs, and management. It invites us to see things differently: to look for constraints, to alleviate them, to think in terms of flows, to act as a system. Above all, it reminds us that improving an organization is not about doing more, but about doing what really matters better.
And this is not limited to factories, as we would too often like to believe (Just because work is invisible, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved).
I will conclude, once again, with this quote:
“Peter Drucker noted that during the twentieth century, the productivity of manual workers in the manufacturing sector increased by a factor of fifty as we got smarter about the best way to build products. He argued that the knowledge sector, by contrast, had hardly begun a similar process of self-examination and improvement, existing at the end of the twentieth century where manufacturing had been a hundred years earlier. ” (The New Yorker – Slack Is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work).
To answer your questions…
The book shows that organizations are systems that should be viewed as a whole, rather than as a series of isolated positions. Improvement comes from identifying the main constraint and resolving it. The goal is not to produce more, but to better target what really matters in order to create an efficient and sustainable flow.
Producing more does not guarantee better performance. It can even create unnecessary overloads. Real progress comes from focusing efforts on the points that block the overall flow. Doing better rather than doing more brings more real value and avoids wasting resources.
The principles described go beyond the industrial context. They apply to all organizations, even those where work is invisible or intangible. Flow, constraints, and systemic vision are universal and can transform both services and intellectual work.
The main risk comes from false certainties. In seeking to reduce costs or optimize locally, we often forget about the consistency of the system. These fragmented approaches lead to ineffective decisions. Adopting a global vision allows us to avoid these pitfalls and truly improve performance.
In industry, productivity increased fiftyfold in the 20th century thanks to a rethinking of methods. In knowledge work, this transformation has not yet taken place. This reveals immense potential for improvement if the same principles of analysis and questioning are applied.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
Related articles:
Thinking of work as a flow: appealing, but is it realistic?
Local optimum vs. global optimum and the theory of constraints: why your productivity gains sometimes serve no purpose
Eliyahu Goldratt’s fictional interview on infobesity and bottlenecks in knowledge work
People Centric Operations 2.0: how AI is reinventing knowledge work at scale
For freelancers, productivity does not always pay off
The numbers we overlook when reinventing work
