The Goal

It feels unfair to read — and grade — this book after reading The Phoenix Project, which in retrospect clearly purloins so much of its style and structure from this. But, fair or not, I ascribe so much of the Socratic structure & cutesy novelistic flourishes to The Phoenix Project that clearly originated in this book, and I think the writing of the spiritual successor — at least in terms of the setting, the characters involved, and such — rang more true there (or perhaps I just feel more at home in an IT background than a manufacturing plant one.)

This book was better on two fronts: I think the weird bits about the protagonist's personal life felt a little more germane to the core conflict, and the guru-character (Jonah in this book) was less of an obnoxious jackass. From a purely didactic standpoint, though, I got lost a bit as the book scaled up in abstractions, whereas I think TPP did a very good job there.