Goldratt's book The Goal is Amazon.com's 262nd best selling book. It's the 13th most popular book in their Management and Leadership category and, not suprisingly, the 4th most popular in Irving, Texax. That's not bad going for a 20 years old business novel.
The Goal introduced the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to the world but, the weird thing is ... no one - apart from my wife, a few odd people on odd email lists and now you - has ever heard of TOC.
Part of the problem is that Goldratt didn't name TOC in the Goal. He saved that until 1990 for his obscure (and fairly dire) book Theory of Constraints which, fortunately, few people have read. The name was finally introduced to the wider world in this (free) chapter of his excellent third novel Critical Chain. Although several zillion have read The Goal, few know the name "Theory of Constraints" or how it has evolved over the last 20 years. That's partly why I'm writing this blog - to spread the word.
The name itself sounds a bit, ummmmm, theoretical. The name is neither descriptive like "agile" or "lean", nor alliterative like "Six Sigma". Some refer to it as "Constraints Managment" instead.
But the name is important. Goldratt is a scientist and TOC is the scientific method, dressed up. TOC is a theory. It's - in my words - the theory that you can achieve big changes by leveraging the few things that "constrain" or limit you. As a theory you may prove it wrong - no one has to my knowledge - but you can't ever really prove it right. If we're lucky someone brainier than Goldratt will come along, prove the theory wrong and give us a new and better theory like Einstein did with Newton.
The article Why Hard-Nosed Executives Should Care About Management Theory by Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor - costing $US6 from harvard business school - is an excellent discussion of "theory" in general and it helped me understand the Theory part of Theory of Constraints:
"Theory often gets a bum rap among managers because it's associated with the word "theoretical," which connotes "impractical." But it shouldn't. Because experience is solely about the past, solid theories are the only way managers can plan future actions with any degree of confidence. The key word here is "solid." Gravity is a solid theory. As such, it lets us predict that if we step off a cliff we will fall, without actually having to do so. But business literature is replete with theories that don't seem to work in practice or actually contradict each other. How can a manager tell a good business theory from a bad one? The first step is to understand how good theories are built. They develop in stages: gathering data, organizing it into categories, highlighting significant differences, then making generalizations explaining what causes what, under which circumstances. For instance, professor Ananth Raman and his colleagues collected data showing that bar code-scanning systems generated notoriously inaccurate inventory records. These observations led them to classify the types of errors the scanning systems produced and the types of shops in which those errors most often occurred. Recently, some of Raman's doctoral students worked as clerks to see exactly what kinds of behavior cause the errors. From this foundation, a solid theory predicting under which circumstances bar code systems work and don't work is beginning to emerge. Once we forgo one-size-fits-all explanations and insist that a theory describes the circumstances under which it does and doesn't work, we can bring predictable success to the world of management".
