The Goal, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt examines the life of an American plant manger in his quest to find out what exactly the goal of a plant manager is and how to go about reaching this goal. Along the way towards realizing the goal, the plant manager is forced define and understand the theory of constraints. It is important to understand the theory of constraints for the manager to be able to identify what restrictions are being opposed onto his various operations and to know how to reverse their affects. In this particular case it takes the manager having to continually deal with orders being finished late and therefore unsatisfied customers and an irate employer in order to realize that serious problems are occurring within his plant.Once the goal, which inevitably turns out to be money, is found, it is imperative to figure out how to express the goal in the form of a measurement. Three measurements are able to not only express the goal of making money, but also make it possible for the manager to develop operational rules for running his plant. These measurements are: throughput, inventory, and operational expense, and everything that the manager manages in his plant is covered by them. Still, the manager must do much thinking and research in order to figure out just how to express his goal in terms of these measurement.In addition to expressing the goal, the manager is troubled by whether employees, robots, and machinery actuall need to be running at all times. At first glance many managers seem to think that an idle worker is an unproductive worker, but Goldratt shows us that in reality a plant in which everyone is working all the time is very inefficient. The manager in the book soon comes to realize that machines don't run themselves -- it takes people to create exc ...