That experience led to a series of "business novels" that are well regarded for their realism by people in their intended markets but are by no means literary. He has also written a series of non-fiction books on the Theory of Constraints that are generally considered to be dense. H. William Dettmer published a textbook (user's guide) and encyclopedia (reference manual) on Theory of Constraints with ASQ's Quality Press (http://qualitypress.asq.org/).
Goldratt's models are quite familiar to folks who have done push through or pull through scheduling. I encountered scheduling drivien by a bottleneck in 1989 or so - at a steel rolling plant. They explicitly designed scheduling to keep the big rolling press busy, with other process steps holding slack as needed. Turns out the big press is expensive as hell, so keeping it busy is a Big Deal(tm). Designing to a bottleneck is fundamental to chemical process design as well. There's one limiting step, usually, and you build things scaled to that step with other less-critical processes taking up the slack. Oil regineries are built pretty much around the big factionating towers, for example. Another example - inverted this time, is glass plants. You pretty much can't shut the furnace down once it's started so the furnace becomes both a bottleneck, and a required throughput - they have a minimum flow as well as a maximum. The rest of the plant, and all the scheduling is built around these constraints.
Constraint models are familiar to some folks from other domians. Where they are novel seems mainly to be in general business, and in optimization situations where the accountants have run amok for a while. This feels similar to the "plan-driven" vs. "adaptive" approaches to software development and software development planning. When the plan stops being a tool and starts defining reality, well, the accountants have run amok. BTW, Deming's first, fundamental point was about process variability - the other half of Goldratt's formula. Again, the problems start when the accountants run amok, in this case demanding predictability beyond the intrinsic variability of the process being measured.
All of that said Goldratt presents the ideas well, along with novel systematic approaches for planning and managing in the presence of variability. One major contribution I think is providing an accounting / return on investment terminology for the real way process throughput optimization works. The later work of this community has expanded into techniques for talking about the undiscussable things - what we don't know and can't predict as well as we'd like. They didn't invent "how to talk about hard things", but again, they've presented it well. This too is valuable. In net, Goldratt and company have presented and added to a valuable set of techniques, and brought them compellingly to audiences they didn't reach before. He didn't invent the whole thing. He's still a very Smart Guy(tm).
Well worth reading, any and all of his books. -- JimBullock
BTW, thanks for the page move. I just used his name as it appears on the books I have. -- jb
You're welcome, and thanks for pointing out that Goldratt's work is much more widely applicable than the manufacturing settings TheGoal suggests. My MBA students apply his thinking process to problems in their own workplaces. At least a third are outside of manufacturing (cleaning hotel rooms, construction project management, outpatient check-in, ...). If it's a process, Goldratt's five focusing steps and thinking process are likely to be useful.
Goldratt's novels are unquestionably good introductions but they are not systematic. Anyone looking for thorough, structured presentation should check out Dettmer's books.
I'm afraid we're getting off-topic, though. Interested readers can check the wiki that starts on Ward's Wiki at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ManufacturingRoadmap. I plan to refactor the existing material, fill in the gaps I see, and invite others to contribute (hint, hint), but I've barely started as of 8/12/04. --GeorgeBrower
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