Back in the day I purchased the The Goal by Eli Goldratt. I loved his work and read it several times as well as every other book he’s written. Yeh, I am that sad! I was developing an MRP system at the time so I did have a vested interest in learning this stuff.
I was thinking about this recently given all the opportunities available, where should my efforts be focused? What can I do *now* that will take me forward? I decided to develop a simple prompt and use Claude to evaluate some projects and opportunities and let it advise on how they would effect the bottom line according to the central thesis of The Goal.
First though, for those not familiar with Eli Goldratt and his work, I got Claude to summarise:
Prompt: Summarise The Goal by Eli Goldratt
The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt (co-written with Jeff Cox, first published 1984) is one of the best-selling business books ever written. Here’s a concise summary:
The Story
The main character is Alex Rogo, a plant manager whose factory has an uncertain future. A company executive gives him three months to turn operations around from being unprofitable and unreliable, or face closure. Alex reconnects with a former physics teacher, Jonah, who helps him solve the company’s problems through a series of telephone calls and brief meetings, using the Socratic method — posing questions rather than giving answers.
The Core Idea
The central message is that the primary goal of any business is to make money, and everything within an organisation should contribute to this goal. All improvements should aim to optimise overall system performance, not just individual parts.
Goldratt introduces three key metrics:
Throughput — the rate at which the system generates money through sales. Inventory — all money invested in purchasing items that will be sold. Operational expense — all money used to turn inventory into throughput.
The Theory of Constraints (TOC)
The book’s central framework is the Five Focusing Steps:
- Identify the bottleneck or limiting factor in your process.
- Exploit the constraint — maximise its output by improving efficiency and eliminating waste.
- Subordinate all other processes to support the bottleneck’s output.
- Elevate the constraint — if needed, invest to increase its capacity.
- Repeat — once one bottleneck is resolved, find and tackle the next.
The Key Insight
Productivity is the act of bringing a company closer towards its goal. The goal is to make money by increasing throughput while simultaneously reducing inventory and operational expense. Fluctuations in a process do not average out — they accumulate. You must optimise the whole system, not just individual processes.
Why It Matters
Although it describes manufacturing operations, The Goal is relevant for all types of situations because it is about learning what makes the world tick so that you can improve it. It’s been required reading on Jeff Bezos’ leadership team and is taught in MBA programmes worldwide.
In short: find your bottleneck, fix it, and keep repeating — everything else is secondary.
So I developed the following prompt to use against Claude:
Prompt: Using the central thesis of The Goal by Eli Goldratt, evaluate the following question and evaluate its effect on the bottom line, ie: Positive Effect, No Effect or Negative Effect. Ask questions if necessary in order to make a judgement:
I ran this a few times with different scenarios and the questions and the responses were gold. It’s not that it’s difficult to arrive at the same conclusions yourself, but it’s more about Claude asking you questions forcing you to think deeply about the answers. Definitely worth playing with, just add your question or proposal after the : symbol in the prompt.