I’ve just finished reading a book. It was the type of book that you pick up and
you cannot put down (other than to perform the mandatory tasks that running
a house and looking after a family entail!) Even the much-awaited new series of
one of my favourite television programmes couldn’t tempt me away from my
book.
Now obviously I’m telling you this for a reason. I love reading and it’s not
unusual to find me glued to a book for several days, if it’s a good one. But
you’ve gathered by now that the book I’ve been reading was not the usual Man
Booker or Orange prize fiction novel that you might ordinarily find tucked away
in my handbag. It was in fact The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eli
Goldratt and Jeff Cox. If by now you’ve settled quickly into the belief that I
must conform to society’s expectations of your typical ‘number crunching’
accountant of which – by the way – I’ve met few in reality, you are wrong. So
what then, you may ask, makes this book so different from the image that the
title conjures up? Let me tell you all about it.