The Goal: a process of Ongoing Improvement

DW: That seems to be a large part of the appeal of The Goal, it’s
accessibility.
PH: Yes, 
The Goal
doesn’t go really deep into the financial difficulties of
running a company. As a matter of fact it completely makes it irrelevant. So
for me it was also a great message that I could just ignore all these economist
Ph.D. people—if they couldn’t explain to me what was going on, then forget
about it! So that was my first experience with the Theory of Constraints.
Then somebody gave me an article that said Eli Goldratt was in Holland to
give a seminar. So I went there. At the seminar Eli told us that he just
increased the price for his Jonah courses from $10,000 to $20,000 because
otherwise top management wouldn’t come; something like that. So I said to
him, “I promise I will come, even at the old price!” He said he had a better
deal for me. If I was to do the course, I could do so and I only had to pay him
after the results were of such magnitude that the price of the course was

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irrelevant.
DW: Good deal.
PH: Yeah, it was a perfect deal. So I went to New Haven, to America. He had
an institute there. Did the course, couldn’t do anything with it. So a year later
I went to a Jonah upgrade workshop; it was in Spain. Eli has a very good
memory, so when he ran into me he said, “Hey, did you pay for your course
yet?” I said, “No, no, I didn’t see any reason why I should.” So he invited me
for a private session. Some people warned me about that! On Monday
morning I had a private session here in Rotterdam. That was a hefty morning.
All my homework and all the things I did were to him completely irrelevant.
The point was, I was looking at my own company and looking for a
production bottleneck when there was so much excess capacity and the
constraint was obviously in the market! But for me that was thinking outside
the box. It had never occurred to me that Theory of Constraints would apply
also outside the company’s walls.