"Correct!" says Jonah.
He reaches under his sweater into his shirt pocket and pulls
out a cigar. He hands it to me.
E.M. Goldratt
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Captured by Plamen T.
38
"My compliments," he says. "When you are productive you
are accomplishing something in terms of your goal, right?"
"Right," I say as I retrieve my briefcase.
We're rushing past gate after gate. I'm trying to match Jonah
stride for stride.
And he's saying, "Alex, I have come to the conclusion that
productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal.
Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is produc-
tive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its goal
is not productive. Do you follow me?"
"Yeah, but . . . really, Jonah, that's just simple common
sense," I say to him.
"It's simple logic is what it is," he says.
We stop. I watch him hand his ticket across the counter.
"But it's too simplified," I tell him. "It doesn't tell me anything. I mean, if I'm moving toward my goal I'm productive and
if I'm not, then I'm not productive—so what?"
"What I'm telling you is, productivity is meaningless unless
you know what your goal is," he says.
He takes his ticket and starts to walk toward the gate.
"Okay, then," I say. "You can look at it this way. One of my company's goals is to increase efficiencies. Therefore, whenever I
increase efficiencies, I'm being productive. It's logical."
Jonah stops dead. He turns to me.
"Do you know what your problem is?" he asks me.
"Sure," I say. "I need better efficiencies."
"No, that is not your problem," he says. "Your problem is
you don't know what the goal is. And, by the way, there is only
one goal, no matter what the company."
That stumps me for a second. Jonah starts walking toward
the gate again. It seems everyone else has now gone on board.
Only the two of us are left in the waiting area. I keep after him.
"Wait a minute! What do you mean, I don't know what the
goal is? I know what the goal is," I tell him.
By now, we're at the door of the plane. Jonah turns to me.
The stewardess inside the cabin is looking at us.
"Really? Then, tell me, what is the goal of your manufactur-
ing organization?" he asks.
"The goal is to produce products as efficiently as we can," I
tell him.
"Wrong," says Jonah. "That's not it. What is the real goal?"
E.M. Goldratt
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Captured by Plamen T.
39
I stare at him blankly.
The stewardess leans through the door.
"Are either of you going to board this aircraft?"
Jonah says to her, "Just a second, please." Then he turns to
me. "Come on, Alex! Quickly! Tell me the real goal, if you know
what it is."
"Power?" I suggest.
He looks surprised. "Well . . . not bad, Alex. But you don't
get power just by virtue of manufacturing something."
The stewardess is pissed off. "Sir, if you're not getting on this
aircraft, you have to go back to the terminal," she says coldly.
Jonah ignores her. "Alex, you cannot understand the mean-
ing of productivity unless you know what the goal is. Until then,
you're just playing a lot of games with numbers and words."
"Okay, then it's market share," I tell him. "That's the goal."
"Is it?" he asks.
He steps into the plane.
"Hey! Can't you tell me?" I call to him.
"Think about it, Alex. You can find the answer with your
own mind," he says.
He hands the stewardess his ticket, looks at me and waves
good-bye. I raise my hand to wave back and discover I'm still
holding the cigar he gave me. I put it in my suit jacket pocket.
When I look up again, he's gone. An impatient gate-agent ap-
pears and tells me flatly she is going to close the door.
E.M. Goldratt
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Captured by Plamen T.
40
5
It's a good cigar.
For a connoisseur of tobacco, it might be a little dry, since it
spent several weeks inside my suit jacket. But I sniff it with
pleasure during Peach's big meeting, while I remember that
other, stranger, meeting with Jonah.
Or was it really more strange than this? Peach is up in front
of us tapping the center of a graph with a long wood pointer.
Smoke whirls slowly in the beam of the slide projector. Across
from me, someone is poking earnestly at a calculator. Everyone
except me is listening intently, or jotting notes, or offering com-
ments.
". . . consistent parameters . . . essential to gain . . . ma-
trix of advantage . . . extensive pre-profit recovery . . . opera-
tional indices . . . provide tangential proof. . . ."
I have no idea what's going on. Their words sound like a
different language to me—not a foreign language exactly, but a
language I once knew and only vaguely now recall. The terms
seem familiar to me. But now I'm not sure what they really mean.
They are just words.
You're just playing a lot of games with numbers and words.
For a few minutes there in Chicago's O'Hare, I did try to
think about what Jonah had said. He'd made a lot of sense to me
somehow; he'd had some good points. But it was like somebody
from a different world had talked to me. I had to shrug it off. I
had to go to Houston and talk about robots. It was time to catch
my own plane.
Now I'm wondering if Jonah might be closer to the truth
than I first thought. Because as I glance from face to face, I get
this gut hunch that none of us here has anything more than a
witch doctor's understanding of the medicine we're practicing.
Our tribe is dying and we're dancing in our ceremonial smoke to
exorcise the devil that's ailing us.
What is the real goal? Nobody here has even asked anything
that basic. Peach is chanting about cost opportunities and "pro-
ductivity" targets and so on. Hilton Smyth is saying hallelujah to
whatever Peach proclaims. Does anyone genuinely understand
what we're doing?
E.M. Goldratt
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Captured by Plamen T.
41
At ten o'clock, Peach calls a break. Everyone except me exits
for the rest rooms or for coffee. I stay seated until they are out of
the room.
What the hell am I doing here? I'm wondering what good it
is for me—or any of us—to be sitting here in this room. Is this
meeting (which is scheduled to last for most of the day) going to
make my plant competitive, save my job, or help anybody do
anything of benefit to anyone?
I can't handle it. I don't even know what productivity is. So
how can this be anything except a total waste? And with that
thought I find myself stuffing my papers back into my briefcase. I
snap it closed. And
then I quietly get up and walk out.
I'm lucky at first. I make it to the elevator without anyone
saying anything to me. But while I'm waiting there, Hilton Smyth
comes strolling past.
"You're not bailing out on us, are you Al?" he asks.
For a second, I consider ignoring the question. But then I
realize Smyth might deliberately say something to Peach.
"Have to," I say to him. "I've got a situation that needs my attention back at the plant."
"What? An emergency?"
"You can call it that."
The elevator opens its doors. I step in. Smyth is looking at
me with a quizzical expression as he walks by. The doors close.
It crosses my mind that there is a risk of Peach firing me for
walking out of his meeting. But that, to my current frame of
mind as I walk through the garage to my car, would only shorten
three months of anxiety leading up to what I suspect might be
inevitable.
I don't go back to the plant right away. I drive around for a
while. I point the car down one road and follow it until I'm tired
of it, then take another road. A couple of hours pass. I don't care
where I am; I just want to be out. The freedom is kind of exhila-
rating until it gets boring.
As I'm driving, I try to keep my mind off business. I try to
clear my head. The day has turned out to be nice. The sun is out.
It's warm. No clouds. Blue sky. Even though the land still has an
early spring austerity, everything yellow-brown, it's a good day to
be playing hooky.
I remember looking at my watch just before I reach the plant
E.M. Goldratt
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Captured by Plamen T.
42
gates and seeing that it's past 1 P.M. I'm slowing down to make the
turn through the gate, when—I don't know how else to say it—it
just doesn't feel right. I look at the plant. And I put my foot down
on the gas and keep going. I'm hungry; I'm thinking maybe I
should get some lunch.
But I guess the real reason is I just don't want to be found
yet. I need to think and I'll never be able to do it if I go back to
the office now.
Up the road about a mile is a little pizza place. I see they're
open, so I stop and go in. I'm conservative; I get a medium pizza
with double cheese, pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, green pep-
pers, hot peppers, black olives and onion, and—mmmmmmmm
—a sprinkling of anchovies. While I'm waiting, I can't resist the
Munchos on the stand by the cash register, and I tell the Sicilian
who runs the place to put me down for a couple of bags of beer
nuts, some taco chips, and—for later—some pretzels. Trauma
whets my appetite.
But there's one problem. You just can't wash down beer nuts
with soda. You need beer. And guess what I see in the cooler. Of
course, I don't usually drink during the day . . . but I look at
the way the light is hitting those frosty cold cans. . . .
"Screw it."
I pull out a six of Bud.
Twenty-three dollars and sixty-two cents and I'm out of there.
Just before the plant, on the opposite side of the highway,
there is a gravel road leading up a low hillside. It's an access road
to a substation about half a mile away. So on impulse, I turn the
wheel sharply. The Mazda goes bouncing off the highway onto the
gravel and only a fast hand saves my pizza from the floor. We
raise some dust getting to the top.
I park the car, unbutton my shirt, take off my tie and coat to
save them from the inevitable, and open up my goodies.
Some distance below, down across the highway, is my plant.
It sits in a field, a big gray steel box without windows. Inside, I
know, there are about 400 people at work on day shift. Their cars
are parked in the lot. I watch as a truck backs between two others
sitting at the unloading docks. The trucks bring the materials
which the machines and people inside will use to make some-
thing. On the opposite side, more trucks are being filled with
what they have produced. In simplest terms, that's what's hap-
pening. I'm supposed to manage what goes on down there.
E.M. Goldratt
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Captured by Plamen T.
43
I pop the top on one of the beers and go to work on the
pizza.
The plant has the look of a landmark. It's as if it has always
been there, as if it will always be there. I happen to know the
plant is only about fifteen years old. And it may not be here as
many years from now.
So what is the goal?
What are we supposed to be doing here?
What keeps this place working?
Jonah said there was only one goal. Well, I don't see how that
can be. We do a lot of things in the course of daily operations, and
they're all important. Most of them anyway ... or we wouldn't
do them. What the hell, they all could be goals.
I mean, for instance, one of the things a manufacturing orga-
nization must do is buy raw materials. We need these materials in
order to manufacture, and we have to obtain them at the best
cost, and so purchasing in a cost-effective manner is very impor-
tant to us.
The pizza, by the way, is primo. I'm chowing down on my
second piece when some tiny voice inside my head asks me, But is
this the goal? Is cost-effective purchasing the reason for the
plant's existence?
I have to laugh. I almost choke.
Yeah, right. Some of the brilliant idiots in Purchasing sure do
act as if that's the goal. They're out there renting warehouses to
store all the crap they're buying so cost-effectively. What is it we
have now? A thirty-two-month supply of copper wire? A seven-
month inventory of stainless steel sheet? All kinds of stuff.
They've got millions and millions tied up in what they've bought
—and at terrific prices.
No, put it that way, and economical purchasing is definitely
not the goal of this plant.
What else do we do? We employ people—by the hundreds
here, and by the tens of thousands throughout UniCo. We, the
people, are supposed to be UniCo's "most important asset," as
some P.R. flack worded it once in the annual report. Brush off
the bull and it is true the company couldn't function without
good people of various skills and professions.
I personally am glad it provides jobs. There is a lot to be said
for a steady paycheck. But supplying jobs to people surely isn't
E.M. Goldratt
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Captured by Plamen T.
44
why the plant exists. After all, how many people have we laid off
so far?
And anyway, even if UniCo offered lifetime employment like
some of the Japanese companies, I still couldn't say the goal is
jobs. A lot of people seem to think and act as if that were the goal
(empire-building department managers and politicians just to
name two), but the plant wasn't built for the purpose
of paying
wages and giving people something to do.
Okay, so why was the plant built in the first place?
It was built to produce products. Why can't that be the goal?
Jonah said it wasn't. But I don't see why it isn't the goal. We're a
manufacturing company. That means we have to manufacture
something, doesn't it? Isn't that the whole point, to produce
products? Why else are we here?
I think about some of the buzzwords I've been hearing lately.
What about quality?
Maybe that's it. If you don't manufacture a quality product
all you've got at the end is a bunch of expensive mistakes. You
have to meet the customer's requirements with a quality product,
or before long you won't have a business. UniCo learned its les-
son on that point.
But we've already learned that lesson. We've implemented a
major effort to improve quality. Why isn't the plant's future se-
cure? And if quality were truly the goal, then how come a com-
pany like Rolls Royce very nearly went bankrupt?
Quality alone cannot be the goal. It's important. But it's not
the goal. Why? Because of costs?
If low-cost production is essential, then efficiency would
seem to be the answer. Okay . . . maybe it's the two of them
together: quality and efficiency. They do tend to go hand-in-
hand. The fewer errors made, the less re-work you have to do,
which can lead to lower costs and so on. Maybe that's what Jonah
meant.
Producing a quality product efficiently: that must be the
goal. It sure sounds good. "Quality and efficiency." Those are
two nice words. Kind of like "Mom and apple pie."
I sit back and pop the top on another beer. The pizza is now
just a fond memory. For a few moments I feel satisfied.
But something isn't sitting right. And it's more than just indi-
gestion from lunch. To efficiently produce quality products
E.M. Goldratt
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Captured by Plamen T.
45
sounds like a good goal. But can that goal keep the plant work-
ing?
I'm bothered by some of the examples that come to mind. If
the goal is to produce a quality product efficiently, then how
come Volkswagen isn't still making Bugs? That was a quality
product that could be produced at low cost. Or, going back a
ways, how come Douglas didn't keep making DC-3's? From ev-
erything I've heard, the DC-3 was a fine aircraft. I'll bet if they
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