A Romance Novel Gets Down to Business--for Productivity

Poor Alex Rogo. His marriage is about to collapse, and things are no better at UniCo, where Alex is division manager. Julie, his wife, wants more time from Alex. His superiors want increased productivity. His second-grade daughter is getting straight A’s. Alex, it seems, is flunking out.

This is a new genre of romance novel, “manufacturing romance,” fiction that comes from the literary land of heavy passions, mythic heroes and monumental conquests. This is “The Goal.”

She puts her hands on her hips.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did stay with a friend,” she says.

“Man or woman?”

Her eyes get hard on me. She takes a step forward.

“You don’t care if I’m home with the kids night after night,” she says. “But if I go away for one night, all of a sudden you have to know where I’ve been, what I’ve done.”

“I just feel you owe me some explanation,” I say.

“How many times have you been late, or out of town, or who knows where?” she asks.

“But that’s business,” I say.

Privately published just over a year ago, “The Goal” has sold more than 100,000 copies. Co-authors Eliyahu M. Goldratt and former Westinghouse writer Bob Fox have done no advertising or publicity for the book, used as a text in at least 40 business and management schools across the country. At one school, Notre Dame, for example, the book accounts for 20% of the course grade in a class called “Labor Management Relations and Religion.”

Hundreds of manufacturers have placed orders: companies like Hughes Aircraft, Teledyne, Pacific Scientific and Calcomp. At trade shows, the book disappears in a matter of hours. Translated into nine languages, “The Goal” sold out after one day in Holland, when all 5,000 first-edition copies were snapped up by a single manufacturer.

Major publishers laughed at the idea of a novel that explained how to increase profitability and productivity, Goldratt and his Creative Output colleague Bob Fox said. Tiny North River Press was chosen to print “The Goal” because its executives were neighbors of Fox.

“They did it as a favor,” Fox said. “Now they’re astounded by how much business it has brought them.”

“My original sales estimate,” Goldratt said, “and I was quite optimistic, was 20,000.”

“It defies all the formulas,” Fox said, “especially since we have yet to spend penny one on advertising and promotion.” Added Fox, laughing, “We weren’t smart enough to do it the right way.”

As partners in the Milford, Conn., “software and thoughtware” company called Creative Output, Fox and Goldratt happened upon the idea for “The Goal” while seeking to convey the message of OPT, or Optimized Production Technology, a management system that began as a method for increasing chicken-coop production while Goldratt was a graduate student at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. So successful was Goldratt’s mathematical procedure for optimizing systems with complex variables that the now 39-year-old entrepreneur/computer whiz extended the software and the philosophy of OPT to apply to any manufacturing venture.

“We were so convinced that the technology was powerful,” Fox said, describing OPT as “a different set of decision rules on how you run many aspects of a manufacturing business.” A washing machine manufacturing company, for example, or a large maker of electronics might adapt OPT to its particular needs by applying its own data base to the OPT program. Efficiency is the objective, Fox said, regardless of where the system is employed.

Tried Conventional Ways

But “it didn’t seem like it (OPT) was getting across, or that clients were going as far and as fast with it as we thought possible,” Fox said. “We tried all the conventional ways of conveying the technology--lectures, videotapes explaining the logic and technique--just a whole host of very conventional ways to explain it.”

Said Fox: “We probably did it all the so-called right ways.”

So Goldratt decided to write a text to go with his system. “But since we all have our memories of textbooks as being boring, dull kinds of things, he decided to write it as a novel,” Fox said. “I think it was strong intuition.”

At UCLA’s Graduate School of Management, Prof. Elwood Buffa said he uses “The Goal” in a course called “Operations, Strategy and Policy” because “the novel really is very instructive. The hero of the novel strides forth and solves some important problems for the company through what I would term really good manufacturing strategy.

“It provides information to students in a form that obviously is unique to them,” Buffa said, “and more interesting than perhaps some of the usual materials we use.”

The Romantic Line

As for the romantic aspects of “The Goal,” “I think the love line is a little to the side,” Buffa said. “I accused him (Goldratt) of adding it later after he figured it would be too dry without it.”

But at least one manufacturing executive, Goldratt said, “became an advocate of ‘The Goal’ ” because “he could relate not only to the industrial section, but also to the part with the wife.”

The novel form was the natural way to convey his management philosophy, Goldratt said. “I believe that’s the only way to really give quite revolutionary ideas. If I would have done it as a textbook--basically condemning the way we have done business the last 40 years--the only result I could have hoped for would have been outrageous antagonism.”

But fiction, Goldratt said, allows the reader to become involved in the story, and thus in the process. “The only way to deliver ideas is to deliver question marks and provide a setting so the reader can reach a conclusion,” Goldratt said. “Then it’s not your idea, the author’s; it’s his, the reader’s. And instead of running into emotions of resisting change, you run into ownership of the invention. Then instead of resistance, you are getting enthusiasm.

“The difference is phenomenal in the speed at which the ideas are implemented.”

Workers Like It Too

Indeed, Bob Fox said, “The Goal” has been eagerly embraced not merely by the captains of manufacturing, but by the workers.

“Manufacturing, no less,” Fox said. “That’s supposed to be the dirty fingernails area. But we’ve found just the opposite. We’ve found people on the shop floor reading the book, in fact buying it from us because they didn’t think management would understand it.

“Most of the people who read the book then take it home and give it to their spouses. What they’re saying is ‘this is my world. I’ve never been able to describe it to you, but this is my world.’ ”

What happens, Fox believes, is that readers begin to identify with the protagonist and his mentor as they strive to work out major manufacturing puzzles. “You try to answer the questions,” he said. “You get that kind of AHA! experience as Alex goes through the book.

“Now the messages that we’ve been trying to communicate in the conventional way,” Fox said, “where we had gotten a small impact, here we have gotten a huge impact. It’s all of a sudden you are discovering it for yourself.”

The discovery, Fox said, is that “for real manufacturing people, what looks good locally doesn’t make sense globally, but all the measurements are local. That’s where it hits such an enormous nerve.”

The “more global” message, he said, is “if we simply look at reality and think logically about it, we might shock ourselves at what we can do.”

But Goldratt is more succinct. What “The Goal” says is “Fellows, it’s up to you. Even very complicated things are complicated because we have complicated them.

“If we just have the courage to face inconsistencies,” Goldratt went on, “to ask questions, then the results are coming.”

A Messianic Zeal

Goldratt brings enormous intensity to his project. He smokes endless cigars and speaks machine-gun style. Many people marvel at his messianic zeal. “I am a fanatic about it,” he said. “I do believe that we are not born to be machines, we are born with the ability to deduce, and the ability to create. It looks as if we have assembled textbooks, the whole thrust of which is to kill creativity.”

In January, a revised and expanded version of “The Goal” will begin appearing in bookstores. Priced initially at $9.95, the trade paperback-sized book has climbed first to $12.95, now to $15. Currently, the book is selling between 1,200 and 1,400 copies per week. “And,” Fox said, “that doesn’t count foreign.”

The success has prodded Creative Output to increase its publishing potential. Within a month, a nonfiction book called “The Race” will be out from Creative Output and North River Press, offering pictures on one page, and text on the page opposite. Later, a collection of what Fox calls “true stories, stories about what people have done as a result of just reading ‘The Goal’ ” will be published. That book will be called “The Results.”

But for Goldratt, his career as a novelist has screeched to a top-selling halt. “If we do more novels,” he said, “people will get the impression that this is the only way.” He has heard talk that more management romance novels may be in the works from other sources, and “now that there are more coming, it’s time to move on.”

So Goldratt has resigned as chairman of Creative Output in order to start the Avraham Y. Goldratt Institute. Named for his late father, a rabbi, newspaper editor and member of Israel’s first cabinet, the new think tank will focus on “creating and disseminating knowledge.”

Said Goldratt: “I like thinking in terms of toys, amusement parks. There are so many ways you can really create an educational environment.”

For Goldratt, “The Goal” has served its purpose. It has trumpeted his manufacturing philosophy around the planet, stimulating change and the exchange of ideas. Also, it has made a lot of money.

“Creative Output has made a substantial amount of money out of ‘The Goal,’ ” Goldratt said. So much so, in fact, that “the internal joke here is that this is the most profitable sales brochure ever.”