Review: The Choice

The Choice by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book has dozens of glowing, 5 star reviews on Goodreads. This isn’t one of them. When I finished the audiobook version, I wondered if that was all there was. I was expecting another “The Goal”, with a fictional story explaining some concepts. You get a bit more personal take on that here – the story is told from Goldratt’s daughter’s perspective, having a kind of Socratic give and take on aspects of the theory of constraints and optimization, aspects relating to how each player frames the problem they are having and how providing a new frame can change the group’s “goal” from impossible to easy. In the examples, this is what Goldratt does. But the way it’s told was quite different than his previous books. At times, the audiobook reminded me of when I listened to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in how the conversations went. This was less deep than “Zen…” but had that feel, and I suspect the target audience would be those who enjoyed “Zen…” and were into business problem solving and manufacturing (actually, more distribution) problem solving. I’ve read many books about framing recently. Compared to these recent books, this seemed a bit dated and theoretical, given the apparently fictional examples. But it does provide some definition of the issue and walks through some examples of possible solutions and ways to think about those solutions that may provide the right kick for your own thinking.

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