do you see the goal-posts?

Vinay kamat

In the hands of Eli Goldratt, management can turn into a page-turner. As a discipline that involves individuals and their personal lives, management needs to speak to them like a novel. It must grip their imagination, entertain them, provoke them. For, ultimately, management is self-realization.

No one explains this better than business guru Goldratt. His book Goal, which he co-wrote with Jeff Cox, is not just a celebration of his experiences in management; it’s a true action-thriller. It’s about a plant manager, his
demanding boss, his unhappy personal life, the fear of losing his job, the
search for solutions, the chance discoveries, and the final realization. You
have to read Goal to understand how Goldratt handles characterisation, conflict, climax, and catharsis.

For Goldratt, catharsis is simply an awareness of oneself. As he says in the foreward to Goal: “If we can better understand our world and the principles that govern it, I suspect all our lives will be better.”

When he visited Mumbai last week to talk to CXOs about his work and ideas, he provoked his audience by trashing strategy: “Strategy is long-term bullshit…Throw your strategy books in the ditch.” Without an understanding of your constraints, how to leverage them, and the purpose of what you are doing, strategy is meaningless. It is just a mental leap without the wings to hold it up.

Despite being racy and suspensful like a John Grisham thriller, Goal has lots of philosophical takeouts. Here’s one big-picture insight: “Just remember we are always talking about the organization as a whole—not about the manufacturing department, or about one plant, or about one department within the plant. We are not concerned with local optimums.”

And here’s a deliberate remark by one of the characters, which reflects the shortfalls of today’s top managements: “…you cannot understand the meaning of productivity unless you know what the goal is. Until then, you’re just playing a lot of games with numbers and words.”

Perhaps the thriller is the simplest way of not just telling a story, but simplifying the conflict in the organization. In real life, too, simplicity unlocks complexity. You only need to believe in it to break convention. Only then will you be able to see your organisation’s goal-posts. That’s the simple tip in Goldratt’s revolutionary idea: Goal.