Good story. Ok performance

The story so good, but unlike The Goal, this story requires a little more work to follow. Without seeing the diagrams and not having them explained in full detail, it takes a bit of imagination to know what the characters are working on. An accompanying PDF would be great!!!

The narration is mediocre. Every character is whiny. And Alex sounds perpetually angry. I preferred the narration in The Goal significantly more, but the story still shines through. It's not grating, but not as good as it could be.

8 people found this helpful

Good, but not as good as the original

overall good audio book. what is really frustrating is the narrator speaking for all participants. hearing his voice as Alex Rogo as well as his 14 year old daughter, wife, or coworkers makes it hard to follow who is who. tools and techniques could have been explained better.

6 people found this helpful

Needs extra voices

Would've been nice if a female narrator read the female parts, it was difficult to keep up with which character was speaking sometimes.

2 people found this helpful

Heavy-handed hard sell of a management approach

Pushes one approach to problem-solving as if it were the be-all-and-end-all. An interesting story, though

1 person found this helpful

Great content and great listening experience

The book is very worth listening. Like other Goldratt's business novels (e.g. The Goal and Critical Chain) the listening experience is so good that it is hard to interrupt listening.
Different from his other novels (which focus more on his findings in applied contexts), this book focuses on his the thinking process and how to apply it in different contexts, such as enterprise management and personal life conflicts.

1 person found this helpful

Great book. Poor narration.

It's Not Luck is a wonderful book that provides an approachable introduction to the Theory of Constraints and the thinking processes. It is one of my favorite books.

When I first read it twenty years ago, I thought: "Here we go. Another author found one solution and thinks it solves all problems." But, I was wrong. Goldratt -- who I had the honor to meet later - did have something new that can help almost anyone analyze almost any problem. I can't recommend this book (in print form) highly enough.

So, I've been waiting for 20 years for the audiobook. Unfortunately, the narration is not up tot the standards I had hoped for.

The main problem is that pretty much all the characters other than Rogo sound like they are whining all the time, especially the women and children. Many characters sound alike, including the two board members and the plant managers. Even when one character is identified as having a British accent in the text, he has no accent in the narration. UGH!

Finally -- and I know this may be petty -- he pronounces Hilton Smyth's name wrong. I guess I was spoiled by the wonderful narration (dramatization, really) in The Goal.

To give the narrator a little credit, somehow he does describe the diagrams in the book such that you can visualize them. Not an easy feat.

OK. I still highly recommend this book based on it's content. Narration could be improved. You may want a non-audio edition nearby to review the diagrams, but it's really not necessary.

1 person found this helpful

I preferred the narration of the goal

Narration using only one voice is weird when a grown man tries to make the voice of a girl teenager

For me better than The Goal

I love The Goal it is a bedrock in my library and motivator to my success. What I love about this book is it gave practical applications and think processes to expand for almost any business.

Narrator changed

The narrator is different and they randomly changed Hilton Smive to Hilton Smith? The content is definitely not as good as it's predecessor "The Goal" but it still has good value and is worth the read/listen.

Cornerstone series for starting my business

Goldratt’s books have been very important to starting my own company, I’ve read the entire series a few times over. Production, marketing, financial metrics, projects and strategy are all covered in ever increasing detail. This book is great for the outside in perspective of running your company. Finding the competitive advantage unique to your knowledge of the market and your skills and then leveraging this for a maffia offer. In essence, all of ToC is constantly pushing you from a cost mindset to a throughput mindset. To get maximum benefits from this work, you’ll have to allow your mind to change.

This book does not offer a detailed plan of how to do it, but it does offer a way to think to find your own strategies and tactics. You will still have to do the work yourself to implement any of it.

BTW, I’m in IT and the Phoenix project is an interesting book to add to the goldratt series to add modern IT to the scope that can be covered. In a way continuous deployment is like JIT, ToC can add buffer management to it and help with thinking processes to find how to leverage superior IT performance in the market. For me, Time & Materials are becoming the cost accounting parallel in IT services. Again, this book (along with the goal, critical chain, and being the goal) is the foundation for those realizations.