Theory of Constraints

by Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Theory of Constraints walks you through the crucial stages of a continuous program: the five steps of focusing; the process of change; how to prove effect-cause-effect; and how to invent simple solutions to complex problems. Equally important, the author reveals the devastating impact that an organization's psychology can have on the process of improvements. Theory of Constraints is a crucial document for understanding what it takes to achieve manufacturing breakthroughs.

Genres: Business, Management, Nonfiction, Leadership, Buisness, Education, Productivity

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Eliyahu Moshe Goldratt (Hebrew: אליהו משה גולדרט) was an educator, author, physicist, philosopher and business leader, but first and foremost, he was a thinker who provoked others to think. Often characterized as unconventional, stimulating, and “a slayer of sacred cows,” he urged his audience to examine and reassess their business practices with a fresh, new vision.

Dr. Goldratt is best known as the father of the Theory of Constraints (TOC), a process of ongoing improvement that identifies and leverages a system’s constraints in order to achieve the system’s goals. He introduced TOC’s underlying concepts in his business novel, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, which has been recognized as one of the best-selling business books of all time. First published in 1984, The Goal has been updated three times and sold more than 7 million copies worldwide. It has been translated into 35 languages.

Heralded as a “guru to industry” by Fortune magazine and “a genius” by Business Week, Dr. Goldratt continued to advance the TOC body of knowledge throughout his life, building on the Five Focusing Steps (the process of ongoing improvement, known as POOGI) with TOC-derived tools such as Drum-Buffer-Rope, Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) and the Thinking Processes. He authored ten other TOC-related books, including four business novels: It’s Not Luck (the sequel to The Goal), Critical Chain, Necessary but Not Sufficient and Isn’t It Obvious? His last book, The Choice, was co-authored by his daughter Efrat Ashlang-Goldratt.

Born in Israel on March 31, 1947, Dr. Goldratt earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Tel Aviv University and a Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy from Bar-Ilan University. He is the founder of TOC for Education, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing TOC Thinking and TOC tools to teachers and their students, and Goldratt Consulting. In addition to his pioneering work in business management and education, Dr. Goldratt holds patents in a number of areas ranging from medical devices to drip irrigation to temperature sensors. He died on June 11, 2011, at the age of 64.

Reviews

[Celso Martins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughtful and easy reading best seller in flow management.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really struggled finishing this book. The topic and theory of constraints was interesting; however, I found the sentences to contradict themselves often and things to be generally unclear. The section about the history of science which was used to provide more authority to the management theory being promoted was completely unnecessary and I believe inaccurate.

I know try to use the principles put forth in the theory of constraints and have found them immensely helpful in organizing thoughts and moving things forward. I recommend reading it!

[Jens Comiotto-Mayer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Goldratt's "Theory of Constraints" bears some real gems, like diving deeper into the Socratic approach and the Evaporating Clouds method, or by elaborating a bit more on the psychology of change per se. Nevertheless, I did not overly enjoy the read, which is both due to the unstructured presentation and the TOC sales show covering nearly the second half of this edition. I heavily doubt this book would've been of any use for me at all if I hadn't read The Goal beforehand, as I always had the feeling I'm just dealing with some secondary literature to it. This was a rather strange experience.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Has a few nuggets of Goldratt's wisdom, but the version that I read was so rife with punctuation errors and run-on sentences, not to mention a general lack of cohesion, that I find it hard to recommend. Read The Goal instead.

[Sidhartha Aiysola · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first book of reading - Mainly started this due to my new job role and was advised by Leader, bare in mind I never read any books besides Goosebumps once when I was a kid.

This book is a graphical representation in a comic world explaining the concepts and issues of implementing the Theory of Constraints from a factory perspective while giving you different scenarios of how to apply the ToC. It has changed the way I look at problems and is a quick read which helps businesses to find their issues/bottlenecks and how to deal with the problems and grow from there onwards.

[Emilis Kuke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Controversial, interesting and useful book

This book, forced my rethink my current understatement about first Dr. E. Goldratt book "The Goal" and all that I thought know about TOC and other management philosophies. After reading "Theory of constraints", now I understand a little bit more about TOC, TQM and JIT development, their similarities and differences, science purpose and development in general, dippendant and indippendant variables, TOC tools and psychological challenges in TOC implementation.

To sum, up after reading this book I got better understatement of these things:
1. What science is at all and how it works (BTW it was very helpful review science tools and science maturity classification).
2. Relation between science, business and management. Management problems, problems magnitude and trends.
3. TOC tools and Socratic way of thinking.
4. Differences between dippendant and indippendant variables in business context.
5. Role of external consultant (less we know - less assumptions we do).
6. Similarities and differences between management philosophies (TOC, TQM, JIT.
7. Psychological TOC implementation challenges and people resistance (Personal interest vs organisational interests).
8. My knowledge level about of TOC and level of understand of book "The Goal".

What I don't got from this book - it's recipe how independently implement TOC. But it's obviously good thing, because it's hardly possible to provide recipe which would be suitable for all possible problems and organisations. TOC is not a recipe, rather it's philosophy with practical tools which by adoption of them could enable to achieve continuous improvement.

Only one two things in this book left unclear - it's detail description of Jonah's training. It sounded as marketing material.

Easy to read 4.5
Easy to understand 3.5
Usefulness 4.7

I recommend this book for everyone who want's to now more about scientific management, TOC and TOC tools,other management philosophies and TOC implementation obstacles.

[KevinS · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (TOC) at first glance seems to be a self-contained text about management philosophy after the author’s critical success of his The Goal. After all, why have a second book when one would suffice? Although this text does a fair job of enumerating the process of TOC it does not stand on its own two feet. Indeed, I feel TOC is more fairly viewed as a supplement to The Goal than as a stand-alone book. Much of the text relies on the reader already having The Goal - knowing the characters, their issues, and the goings-on. The book further irritated me with Goldratt’s additional plugs for getting the reader to share TOC & The Goal with coworkers and enrolling in his institute’s workshops & seminars. Admittedly, these aren’t bad ideas but the separation of communicating key ideas across multiple books and media feels - well, corporate.

If you haven’t read The Goal you can definitely glean the gist from TOC. Here I made a mistake and pushed through reading this text, but TOC is still a fine read. In it Goldratt shares judicious wisdom about politics, working with a team, the Socratic method, and identifying & resolving key issues that may be relevant for one’s work. The insights he shares will certainly resonate with his audience, though it appeals to readers with more experience than it does using data to communicate just why what he writes is important.

All in all, TOC has its pros & cons and is worth a read on the whole.

[Gustavo Fernandes · Rating 4 out of 5]

First part of the book was very good. My context is engineering and software development, so the reading needed a translation step to bring to my reality, but certainly valuable. Continuous improvement is a mantra in software world, but challenging that with "we should focus our energy somewhere else" gave a new insight. Especially when only a certain group of a company did some improvements and moved the constraint somewhere else. If the other place resists in changing, the department that DID the changes will most-likely suffer from that because it now has spare time or similar. Quite valuable.
Second was average-to-low, felt like promoting his workshops too much instead of pushing ideas further on. Very last chapter provided a good comparison TOC with JIT and TQC, pointing similar points and also differences. Could dig deeper for sure.
All in all, good one, not time wasted! =)

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really fast read. It more directly goes into the evaporating cloud, the Socratic method of questioning instead of teaching, and spends a good amount of time talking about how to get more people involved with their trainings/confrences.

The content of this feels much closer to what I would expect to be packed into a full day seminar. I wish there was more clearly spelled out information around the techniques mentioned in these books, but you know that’s the purpose of the trainings.

[Chriskelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an able followup to Goldratt's The Goal.
TOC expands on the goal in several directions.
I will reread both if/when I have a specific process improvement opportunity on my hands.

Where The Goal outlines how to improve a manufacturing process through allegory, TOC demonstrates that the same thought process can/should be brought to bear on the entire business.
Operations humming along nicely? Well, then perhaps Sales is your contraint.

Good book.

[Yehia Abo el-nga · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a reflection on the success of Goldratt's other book, The Goal. It analyzes the choices made by Jonah and Alex and delves deep into what makes a Jonah. The write up of this book is experience-derived. It is narrated as a memory dump. Its organization could have been better and to the point. I don't think I benefited much from that book.

[Jessica Berry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started this before I read The Goal, definitely the wrong order. Read The Goal first then come back to this one to reinforce the theory. It's a dry read either way, but it'll make more sense with context from The Goal. But this one is worth it (at least the first half, the second half not as much) to also get a 101 on Effect-Cause-Effect and the Evaporating Clouds Method.

[Liraz Shay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life changing book! teaches you how to think!
It changed the way I think.
Be prepared - It's very very deep book!
And it's need to be learned not only read once (this rule applied for other Eli's Books)
It's not something to read before going to sleep :)
It's very important to read "The Goal" before reading this book

[Bruno Figares · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fine book

I am surprised how we can get away with going through college without some basic courses that cover toc and process engineering, regardless of the major. A critical topic I dare say

[Johnny · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book offers a lot of background information on the theory of Constraint. However, it is far less interesting than Critical Chain.

[Serge Huybrechts · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first 7-8 pages of the book are what I needed from it: it explains briefly the theory of constraints. The rest of the book is (at least for me) an overly technical description on how to introduce change in an organisation. DNF.

[Eileen Winfrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The application of the theory seemed to be just out of my reach. I couldn’t quite grasp what it is I’m supposed to do. The anecdotes were interesting and true to life, but what I should do vis a vis the Theory, I do not know. I tried.

[Nacho Bassino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buen acompañante de The Goal, menos “revelador” pero un complemento útil

[Jeremiah · Rating 4 out of 5]

told in a story book form.

[Jason Orthman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book after hearing Richard White from WiseTech talk about how the ‘theory of constraints’ is so important to his organisation. However, I struggled to see the value in this book.

[Isabel Hogue · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good companion to Goldratt's novels, The Goal, and It's Not Luck

[Abhilash Gopalakrishnan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for great management who can use brains and identify bottlenecks without wasting others time. A systems approach as well.

[Santosh Vadlamani · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is good in bits and pieces. It sounds like a critic review of The Goal, with suggestions on what the could be attended appended to that. Still helpful

[Ilse Timmerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to read it for school. It was an interesting view but a bit told like a textbook.

[Richard Fabian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good way to finish reading The Goal. It explains in some detail some of the points the book strives to make, but without any ambiguity. Highly recommended you read this directly after.

[Indra Jayanthan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its not a usual book but an advertising brochure for various TOC seminars. Got few golden nuggets of wisdom in between though

[Étienne Garbugli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rough read when you don't start by The Goal.

[Elizabeth LaForce · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first third of the book had some good insights, but it just got increasingly incomprehensible from there.

[Lukasz]

recommendation: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Jane Bresnan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really poorly written and repetitive book. Recommended by my manager, who I now lost respect for..