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Paperback
384 pages
ISBN 9780884271789 Published July 2004
North River Press
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Goal
A Process of Ongoing Improvement (Anniversary)
By Eliyahu M Goldratt, Jeff Cox, David Whitford 

Related Blog Posts
Friday Links(ish)
Posted Oct. 21, 2011 8:21 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

While Dylan is relaxing on his honeymoon in Costa Rica, I'm going to take a stab at my version of Friday Links. Enjoy!

There has been a lot of talk both online and around the water cooler about the New York Times article "Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal" published earlier this week that made the bold statement:

Amazon.com has taught readers that they do not need bookstores. Now it is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.

The author, David Streitfeld, goes on to detail the moves Amazon has made to establish itself as a competitor to more traditional publishers which, right or wrong, are made to seem submissive in the face of Amazon's emergence, depicted here quite colorfully with references to fear, confusion, and anger. Amazon, in turn, sounds nearly benevolent to authors and their struggles to get published. Needless to say, the article has sparked some strong opinions. Here are two of them:

Friend of company and all-around-smart-publishing-person, John Eklund, a rep for Harvard University Press, The MIT Press, and Yale University Press, takes issue less with the article itself, than with the assertion made by "a top Amazon executive" that “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and the reader.” In his Paper Over Board blog post, who needs editors? writers, Eklund counters:

[N]obody- or precious few anyway- has written a book worth reading on their own. Someone taught you to write, someone took care of the kids and the bills while you wrote, perhaps someone even gave you ideas. And once an editor recognized quality and meaning in your work, and persuaded her house to take a chance on you, a complicated publishing apparatus improved on your creation.

That’s not always how it works. And one solution might be more publishers, not fewer. But as a reader, I’ll continue to buy books that have been brought to market by experienced professionals with a publishing legacy, and will be wary of books that make a virtue out of scorning them.

The AARdvark blog, "created by the AAR Digital Rights Committee to educate the membership on all aspects of and issues surrounding the emerging digital publishing marketplace" takes on the article itself, in a post titled, Really, New York Times??, asking readers not to just find it either 'yesterday's news' or even revealing an uncomfortable truth, but to feel some "rage" over it.

Monday’s New York Times front page article on Amazon’s “writing publishers out of the deal” has been much commented-on. But I think it calls for some rage. As someone who really cares about this industry, the simplistic and narrow focus is infuriating; and the message it conveys to people outside the business is misleading at best and damaging at worst. I would have expected more insight and at least some analysis from ‘the newspaper paper of record.’

Author, Brian DeFlore, whose vitae provides ample evidence of this knowledge of the subject, takes offense at the tone of the article which, as he reads it, paints Amazon in a most favorable light.

And yes, it is sexy to think of Amazon as the great democratizer, and the Times uses that for effect. But of course Amazon could swat any publisher out of existence with a flick of its mighty wrist. If there is a Goliath, it ain’t the publishers. You’d think the Times would address that.

No doubt the evolution of the publishing industry will continue to stir up great passion, and it is impossible to predict just how it will all shake out. Look at the evolution of the music business: it still hasn't ceased to change. But we can take solace in the fact that there is indeed such passion over our passion for reading.

***

On November 3rd, the winner of the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award will be announced. The Financial Times has posted a number of videos to their YouTube channel of business leaders discussing great business books.

Cynthia Carroll, CEO of Anglo American, talks about Michael Porter's On Competition

Pete Redfern, Chief Executive of Taylor Wimpey makes an unconventional pick, Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.

Samir Brikho, Chief Executive, Amec, explains how he uses Eliyahu M Goldratt and Jeff Cox's The Goal in his organization.

***

In our The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, Jack chose Personal History by Katharine Graham as one of his favorite biographies. Graham ran the Washington Post Company from 1963-1991, an amazingly long time for any business person to helm a company.

But her success was not without struggle. Throughout her tenure as publisher, she had problems garnering the respect of her peers and subordinates, and, in this book, she discusses her struggles with trusting her own instincts. But it is indeed her obvious success as a leader and as a moral icon that makes this book essential reading.

This book came to mind this week when I watched this story on CBS News about Jill Abramson who has been named the new Executive Editor of the New York Times. She will have an incredible challenge in the coming years to intertwine the paper and digital visions of the paper. And, of course, the challenge of being a woman in the top newspaper job. About this, Abramson says:

"I'm very conscious of the past battles that woman journalists waged to rise up in the newsroom, and that happened here at the Times, too," Abramson said. "It would be nice to think we would get to the point where it wasn't so remarkable when a woman rose to the top job at an important institution. But we aren't there yet."

Indeed. But both Graham and Abramson have helped advance the process.



Jeff Hayzlett's Business Library
Posted April 27, 2010 8:35 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

If you know who Jeff Hayzlett is, it is probably from his appearances on television or his Twitter footprint. But the chief marketing officer of Kodak is now venturing into the wonderful world of analog with his new book, The Mirror Test: Is Your Business Really Breathing?, being released by Business Plus in May. And he has done something in that book that I wish more authors would do. He has included an appendix in which he lists his "Business Library 'Must' List." It gives you an idea of what has influenced him most over the years (and, just maybe, an idea of what to expect from his book). It includes:

Not only does his book get extra points from me for including a list of his favorites, Hayzlett himself gets extra credit for using a Garrison Keillor quote to introduce the list: "A book is a gift you can open again and again."



Jack Covert Selects - Velocity
Posted Jan. 15, 2010 7:03 a.m. by 800-ceo-read

Velocity: Combining Lean, Six Sigma, and the Theory of Constraints to Achieve Breakthrough Performance by Dee Jacob, Suzan Bergland & Jeff Cox, Free Press, 310 Pages, $26.00 Hardcover, January 2010, ISBN 9781439158920

In physics, velocity is a simple equation: speed + direction = velocity. AGI-Goldratt Institute’s new book, Velocity, takes that simple equation and applies it to business: operational speed + strategic direction = immediate gains. But where to apply such a simple equation is often the problem. When seeking improvement, should an organization improve everything? Or concentrate its efforts in one direction? If not improving everything, then what does an organization choose as its focus? Velocity endeavors to answer these questions.

You may be familiar with the name of the AGI-Goldratt Institute because its founder Eliyahu Goldratt is the author of the bestselling business novel from 1984, The Goal. Velocity is also a business novel, and its set up is similar to that of The Goal, which centers around a new plant manager who is tasked with improving productivity of his unit. Applying principles he learns from his “guru” (a common feature in business novels and fables), a physicist named Jonah, the plant manager learns the proper metrics for which to judge productivity and introduces Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (TOC) which is a way of looking at a process as a physical entity in order to determine the bottleneck that is slowing production.

This novel adds TOC with two other well-known continuous improvement systems—Lean and Six Sigma. The authors explain: “Velocity—as a concept—is the means by which the organization orchestrates all of its resources, as well as all three improvement disciplines, and achieves both speed and direction toward its strategic goals.” In the story, the main character is Amy Cieolara, a high performing head of the sales and marketing division of Hi-T, a manufacturing company that has been bought out by a larger company that prides itself on using a Lean Six Sigma (LSS) approach to their operations. In the chaos that inevitably happens as a result of this change of leadership, Amy is made interim president of Hi-T based solely on her good record, not on her experience. Through the course of the book, Amy gets a crash course in lean manufacturing and Six Sigma quality principles from Wayne Reese, the new vice president of operations, an LSS expert. Not to give away too much, but the approach works quickly once Amy gets a team in place and a strategy set, and Hi-T’s “improved operations had pleased the customers, and pleasant customers had re-energized the sales force, who in turn had delivered more sales.”

Velocity is really about the three main continuous improvement methodologies, working together, that can be applied and sustained no matter what changes take place in a company, including staffing and leadership, or in current market conditions. The benefit of reading this information in business novel form is that readers learn the theories and problems through real world scenarios—not just academic conjecturing. By bringing real human emotions, including the fear of change and new responsibilities, to the application of LSS and TOC, Velocity inspires rather than intimidates. And when it comes to change and the demand for improvement, particularly in an economy such as ours, making improvements manageable is really the first step toward success.



Tweet-a-tweet-Tweet Recap
Posted May 2009 9:05 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Publishing Industry - 800 CEO Read Blog

We posted quite a bit over on twitter this week. We tried pulling together what we saw people saying about business books, recommendations for business books and some ideas around the future of publishing at large. Here is the what we found:

# Authors 4 #followfriday @gladwell @stevenbJohnson @danielpink @alanmwebber @jack_welch @suzywelch @johncmaxwell @tonyrobbins @Rich_Dad about 4 hours ago from web

# RT @TalentAcquisit The Art of War by Sun Tzu is 1 of the best business strategy books. For business strategy check out http://www.sonshi.com 9:18 PM Apr 29th from web

# RT @charlesseybold Books: finished Predictably Irrational (****), starting Art of Profitability (v good so far), biz novel like The Goal 1:52 PM Apr 29th from web

# @kennypratt yes, here is the mystery box url: http://800ceoread.com/mysterybox 10:04 PM Apr 28th from web

# RT @tomewing:The Cluetrain Manifesto is the Velvet Underground of biz books: everyone who read it formed a dodgy start-up. (via @ricklevine) 3:57 PM Apr 28th from web

# RT @mdrips Escape from Cubicle Nation is ok; Think Big Manifesto totally sucks; Me 2.0 is mediocre. Few biz books are worthwhile. 3:56 PM Apr 28th from web

# RT @robbiebax @BtoBGuru great non-social media biz books 2008 "forces for Good" "back of the napkin" "predictably irrational"--loved em all! 3:02 PM Apr 28th from web

# RT @whgtoga Cool book ! One of the top 100 biz books of all time. (CEO READ) The Story Factor- Annette Simmons. 2:57 PM Apr 28th from web

# Great to see @jack_welch joining Twitternation today.2:38 PM Apr 28th from web

# oops RT @sarahcannon Finished reading Tribes over wkend, halfway thru The Tipping Point this wk. Both read too easily to be biz books...2:35 PM Apr 28th from web

# @sarahcannon Finished reading Tribes over wkend, halfway thru The Tipping Point this wk. Both read too easily to be biz books...2:35 PM Apr 28th from web

# Looking for what business books to read? Check out our 377 reviews - http://800ceoread.com/blog/... 3:52 PM Apr 27th from web

# RT @Techmeme Amazon Acquires Stanza, an E-book Application for the iPhone (Brad Stone/Bits) http://bit.ly/JkHFz (via @debbiestier)3:42 PM Apr 27th from web

# RT @sharif28 Just kick-started my daily reading regimen by ordering 3 new books: Tribes, Business Stripped Bare and the Think Big Manifesto.3:33 PM Apr 27th from web

# RT @LauraJDaley My two favorite biz books are Primal Leadership & A Whole New Mind. 12:00 PM Apr 26th from web

# You can follow Nancy at @nancyduarte.12:00 PM Apr 26th from web

# Nancy Duarte on passion and purpose - http://bit.ly/JFNAX The Element, Outliers, and Talent Is Overrated all intersect here. 11:58 AM Apr 26th from web

# RT @chinasolved Pirated biz-books now @ my sbwy sta. Saw 'Black Swan' 'Essential Drucker" & 'Outliers' for 10 rbm each. 10:51 AM Apr 26th from web

# RT @fredwilson: Kenny Lerer is co-founder of HuffPo & here's his thoughts on newspapers http://bit.ly/v8Z0y

You can follow us at @800ceoread or jump over to our twitter page.



Business Novels
Posted July 3, 2008 5:46 a.m. by dylan
In Book Reviews - 800 CEO Read Blog

In his wonderful review of Personal Days in last weeeknd's New York Times Sunday Book Review (free subscription), Mark Sarvas pondered the following:

... considering the ubiquity of the work experience in American lives, and the thousands upon thousands of novels published annually, perhaps the question shouldn't be why there are two work-related novels right now but why there aren't many more.

The other "work-related novel" he is speaking of here is Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End (read Dan Pink's review of that book here, or the NYT Sunday Book Review review here). I think Sarvas poses a good question. And, though it's a far cry from a real answer, there are a few other recent and successful examples I can think of.

Max Barry's Company has been well received by those who've taken notice (as were his other two books) and there are many who have. You can read the first chapter of that book here. Although it's officially a memoir, and not a novel, I really enjoyed Rock On, Dan Kennedy's February release about his time spent in the bowels of the music industry (read a review from our beloved sister company here and other reviews from the book's website here). And, finally, we have Back Bay Books' recently released Bank, David Bledin's promising debut novel about life in investment banking. For an example of his style and perspective, head on over to this rather humorous and slightly depressing Huffington Post entry.

That is by no means an overwhelming number of books considering, as Sarvas said, "the thousands upon thousands of novels published annually." There is also a similarity between all of these books--they're all satires, skewering the industries they work in and write about. Kate Jennings noticeded this trend way back in 2001 in an article about business novels for strategy+business:

...as the century progressed, the fecund field of business fiction was all but abandoned by serious novelists. In fact, the problem in the last 25 years is not one of novelistic "bad press" but hardly any press at all. To be sure, there have been a number of satires, some of them brilliant, that fall under the business-novel rubric: Martin Amis's Money: A Suicide Note (1984); Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998); David Lodge's Nice Work (1988); Bill Morris's Biography of a Buick (1992); Po Bronson's Bombardiers (1995); Douglas Coupland's Microserfs (1995); Julian Barnes's England, England (1998); and Kurt Andersen's Turn of the Century (1999). Nothing wrong with satire, but when it gets too broad, too silly, played only for yuks, it loses resonance. If we set aside these works, sober fictional treatments of business, such as Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997) and Richard Powers's Gain (1998), are scarcer than Republicans who are proregulation.

Of course, Kate Jennings is author of her own satirical take on the business world, Moral Hazard, based on her own experience as a speechwriter on Wall Street.

If you're interested in more on business novels, you can find The American's pick of the top ten of all time here.

I was somewhat surprised while looking around for more on this subject not to see Eliyahu M. Goldratt's The Goal mentioned in any of these conversations. That is one business novel that is most definitely not satire.






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