The Goal

2 Pages 417 Words

Eliyahu M. Goldratt’s The Goal


When I first started reading The Goal, I felt that I couldn’t relate to the topic and setting of the book, since I am still an undergraduate business student who has not even begun studying a specific area of business. But the more and more I read, the more I became interested in the story and the more involved I became in rooting for the success of the plant.

Never before have I really thought about the world of manufacturing, especially managing a plant that produces industrial parts. As a marketing major, I think I have always felt that manufacturing was a completely separate part of business like the financial aspects of business (accounting and finance). The Goal brought into perspective the problems that can arise from the different demands on the manufacturing process, especially the differences in goals among the different parts of a business.

I never realized, until reading this book, the pressures that marketing puts on manufacturing and the consequences of the pressures to produce more and more to sell at lower and lower costs in order to gain customers. I also thought it was interesting that a business could have been running for so long with different goals—one department was concerned with inventory, one department was concerned with cost, and one department was focused on pleasing customers and trying to sell as many orders as possible. When Jonah helped Alex focus in on the real goal of the plant, to make money, it seemed to me that a goal so simple should have been obvious to everyone in the company from the start. I now realize the importance of communication within an organization on all levels, especially when it comes to matters of money and production, since those two factors almost drove Alex’s plant out of business.

In conclusion, I feel that this was an extremely valuable and pleasant read for me as a business student, and I would highly recommend th...