By Dr. Eli Goldratt
A new hero is winning the hearts and minds of American Managers. The hero’s name is Alex Rogo, and thousands of executives know of his struggle as plant manager to save the UniCo factory in the town of Bearington from being shut down.
Rogo’s fans can recount how the division manager, Bill Peach, drove up in his crimson Mercedes with the Number One license plate and gave Rogo an ultimatum: “Al, this is it: You’ve got three months to turn this plant around.”
They can tell you how marketing executive Johnny Jones, who sits behind a glass-and-chrome table and wears Gucci loafers and silk socks, leaned on Rogo to process the orders of his top customers first. They know about Hilton Smyth, the self-promoter whose temporary elevation over Rogo made it seem for a moment that all was lost.
Most of all, they can tell you about Jonah, the imperious physicist who helped Rogo discover and pursue the proper goal, which is making money, not saving it. Armed with new understanding, Rogo and his comrades circumvented the baleful scrutiny of financial officer Ethan Frost and his obsolete cost-accounting practices and executed a stunning turnaround. Rogo ultimately realised that the principles he had learned apply to more than just manufacturing. They are in fact the basis of a philosophy of ongoing improvement whereby change becomes the norm rather than the exception, and short-term gains are merely positive reinforcement to keep going and reap long-term benefits.
Alex Rogo is a fictional character from a most unusual book, The Goal that has sold over 2,000,000 copies world-wide. Many companies tell of dramatic results after key people have read and implemented its ideas. A year after executives at Modine Manufacturing Co. read the book, they reported that work-in-process inventory had fallen by 70 percent. Their average manufacturing lead-time – from raw material to shipment – dropped from 12.7 days to 3 days. Absenteeism plummeted by more than 20 percent.
Many readers say they read the 274-page book in one or two sittings, unable to put it down. “I felt I was the main character and the situations were ours,” wrote one vice president of manufacturing. The enthusiasm of some readers seems to know no bounds. One called it “the single most important literary work concerning business that has or may ever come along.” Yet even management professors wrote excited letters, and some planned to use it in their courses. Kodak and General Electric managers were among those ordering copies for key personnel, and some orders were in the hundreds.
With the help of the diagrams woven into the story-line, readers can understand the scientific reason all systems tend to fall further and further behind schedule: Slowness accumulates in a system, and there are ceilings on how much catching up can be done. The Goal demonstrates that there are two types of resources in an organisation, bottlenecks and non-bottlenecks, and that this fact has “vast implications.” Bottlenecks, importantly, are not good or bad, but simply resources, human or mechanical, whose capacity is less than or equal to the demand placed on them. The challenge is to identify and use bottlenecks to control the flow of product through the plant and into the market. A crucial principle: An hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour lost for the entire system; an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage.
The principal author of The Goal is Eliyahu M. Goldratt, an Israeli physicist and management consultant. Goldratt says Alex Rogo illustrates that what executives need most “is not brainpower, but the courage not to run away from the problems.”
One of the people who has read and praised The Goal was the grand old man of manufacturing, Dr. W. Edwards Deming.
We have a number of The Goal 3rd Edition in stock in Sydney at $45.00 each plus postage.
To order your copy now Contact Us
When you think of management and team effectiveness do you often wish it could be better? Do you want to lead your team to higher levels of performance, but are not sure how to start or make it happen?
Do you often find it is difficult to:
What if you could achieve the following:
If you could witness positive change in behaviour and achieve specific and measureable results after just a few days then having your team attend the Management Skills Workshop maybe your answer.
This workshop is specifically designed for effective communication in day to day (tactical) decision making. Using a selection of the Theory of Constraints Logical Thinking Tools particpants learn, practice and apply the tools to specific problem areas of of your business and gain almost immediate results.
Who should attend?
The MSW Program
3 x 2 day workshops with either 1 or 2 weeks gap to allow for real time practice of the tools learned.
Minimum number of participants is 6 - maximum is 16.
Some results and comments
If you think that the Management Skills Workshop is for you and your team then we would be delighted to provide some further background information. Contact Us
The majority of our clients choose us to help rapidly transform their business performance and get results that matter. Training and education form part of this process. Others simply want to try it for themselves and need a jump start without the arduous research.
We offer a number of training and education options to suit your needs, budget and timetable
Learning outcomes
Who should attend
Business owners, senior and middle managers and shop floor supervisors who seek business improvement and/or are engaged in the day to day running of the business.
The Goal, by Dr Eliyahu M.Goldratt is essential reading for anyone serious about business improvement and accelerates learning outcomes from the workshops and seminars.
Introductory sessions: 2 – 4hrs
1 day Workshops
Supply chain competitiveness is recognised as critical to successful management of business yet few organisations have mastered how to simultaneously achieve low inventory investment (cost) and high customer service. Its usually boils down to low cost /low service or high cost /high service. Goldratt has introduced a rather daring and simple solution that defies common beliefs and practice and it works. Time after time companies are achieving lower inventory levels together with significantly improved service levels generating more profits and reducing costs.
2 day Workshops
Participants are introduced to a radical yet simple approach to project management that avoids the many causes of project failure. The program starts by first understanding the core problem that leads to projects failing 4 out of 5 times. Understanding the causes alone is not sufficient to deliver better outcomes but is important. A primary cause of project failure is the way we assign "safety" to project estimates. This safety is poorly managed and is shown to obstruct project completion. Through workshop simulation exercises we build a new set of rules for managing projects. For both single and multi-project environments particpants learn how to plan and execute projects in typically 2/3rds the normal time with less cost with full scope. The ones that do fail, fail by a very small margin when compared to current methods.
6 day Management Skills Program
Every session provides sufficient material to implement a least one TOC principle in your work place to be able to witness a significant improvement in performance if the principles are implemented as taught. The longer duration session deliver greater content and therefore more improvement potential. Session fees are very affordable. Contact us for further information.
Education: purpose is to transfer a solid understanding of the basic principles of Theory of Constraints
Training: purpose to transfer the knowledge of the principles into functional and practical skills that can be applied on the job.
We run public workshops on demand. Register your name and email address to indicate your preferences and receive news on when these workshops will be run.
Call 0418 207 362 to find out what would work best for you in your current situation. Contact Us for our detailed information packs on each course.
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