When I got my first managerial role in a software organization, my boss told me to read The Goal. I was really turned off by the fake family narrative aspect. I skimmed it, trying to pick out the practical business parts. I was already aware of Agile and continuous improvement / Kaizen, and physical manufacturing had nothing to do with my job, so "Theory of Constraints" didn't speak to me much.
When I finished the book, my boss asked me what I thought. I told him I didn't like it, and he laughed and told me it was awful. I shut my mouth instead of asking me why he recommended the book in the first place.
That was my first introduction to management BS.
For OR, and manufacturing in general, and when the book was written in the early 1990s when these ideas were newer and we didn't have the Internet for disseminating information, The Goal and TOC were probably more valuable to the contemporary audience.
I was working in manufacturing at the time I read The Goal, and I didn't get what was so special about it either. Having done JIT, time studies / line balancing, PERT/CPM, and other tools in the industrial engineering trade, I didn't think there was anything revolutionary about it. Maybe for those operating at an abstract level of operations management it was novel, but for those of us in the boots-on-the-ground mode, it was largely a rehash of existing ideas.
I agree that The Goal isn't the greatest literary novel in history; but then it doesn't set out to be that.
For me, the genius of ToC is that it provides a focussed, step-by-step way to get to the big productivity improvements; whereas lean/kaizen, while also very effective, can take an age to get to the same place.
Ah. That's what I thought, and I originally wrote "early 1980s" (which made my reference to the Internet more sensible), but then I changed it based on the "1992" date shown on the Amazon page (for the 2/ed, or something like this.)
Also, the cover just reeks of business-book BS (http://www.amazon.com/*/dp/0884270610)
When I finished the book, my boss asked me what I thought. I told him I didn't like it, and he laughed and told me it was awful. I shut my mouth instead of asking me why he recommended the book in the first place.
That was my first introduction to management BS.
For OR, and manufacturing in general, and when the book was written in the early 1990s when these ideas were newer and we didn't have the Internet for disseminating information, The Goal and TOC were probably more valuable to the contemporary audience.