Critical Chain

Project Management and the Theory of Constraints

By: Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Narrated by: Alexander Cendese, Rick Adamson, Tavia Gilbert

A young, untested team of problem solvers challenged with saving their company moves from board room to classroom in search of answers - and finds them through lively, open discourse with their innovative professor. This gripping, fast-paced business novel does for project management what Eliyahu M. Goldratt's other novels have done for production and marketing.

©1994 2014 Goldratt1 Ltd. (P)2014 HighBridge Company

Critic reviews

"This is valuable to two main audiences: project managers and senior managers...useful for dealing with one of the most difficult and pressing management challenges: developing highly innovated new products." ( Harvard Business Review)

Ideas intriguing, writing/direction acceptable

The ideas in this novel are at least smart: I cannot say yet if they are as brilliant as the ideas in /The Goal/, but they come from the same place. As you’ll remember, in /The Goal/ the central purpose of a company is to maximize profit, translated from an accountant’s global perspective (having enough money in the bank to not die, then keeping ROI up while simultaneously investing as much as won't kill you) to a physicist’s local perspective (you have some queue of orders that already strategically matches the ROI goals, you can assume you will handle all of them eventually, so your goal is to reduce the time between when an order comes in and when it leaves: this alone maximizes your profit per unit time, and it is worth making many steps inefficient if it improves this lead time).

The central question here is, most of the strategies of /The Goal/ concern having variable order streams for the same 50 products, but many companies instead face a situation where your queue of orders contains unique products: how do we optimize /that/? In other words what happens in a context where you cannot reasonably identify bottlenecks in order throughput, because the orders have no shared structure that can be used to define a “bottleneck”?

The book like its predecessor tacks on personal conflicts to humanize the material, but here they fall much more flat. Goldratt’s narrative switches between points of view in order to present information that the main character, a college professor, would not have been privy to: but it is debatable that this is necessary in the first place. The bigger problem is that the narrator is not being changed so much by the journey he has embarked upon. One might imagine that a college professor has a lot of personal tasks that could be thought of as projects, and so there would be a personal journey to this story: if so, that is extremely implicit.

The book realizes the scattered points of view by switching actual physical narrators, which is extremely jarring, especially when they do not agree on the pronunciation of the central company GeneModem. Alexander Cendese is not a bad narrator but his voice has a charming gravelly-ness to it that unfortunately makes the characters bleed together, when you interrupt him in this way with folks who do not have that same vocal texture. With /The Goal/ I may have questioned the running soundtrack but the ensemble of voice actors seen there truly would have helped here: Rather than trying to pick out two different narrators’ takes on one character as “the same” it would have been nice if that character were just always voiced by the one.

Great way of explaining TOC

It's been one of the best ways to understand the TOC applicable to PM. I'm only sorry of not reading it sooner.

fun listen, great nuggets for forsight

I thought I would not like it, I ended up putting in better placement in my reading rotation. I will probably get more from this author.

I just a good story that teaches me.

A good story will always add to any lesson worth learning. This author knows how to put it all together in a paletable story anyone can relate too.

extremely valuable

the story keeps you interested and is very relatable. It teaches you to think like a manager but is not boring at all.