Following up on my recent interest in learning and teaching the art of storytelling to engineering leaders, I wanted to share a great example of how to use a story to teach a doozy of a subject like operations research.

“The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt is a book about the Process of Ongoing Improvement using a technique called the theory of constraints.

Startups are a strange place. I don’t know what was stranger: that Chuck Ganapathi suggested it to me as a vacation read when I was at Tact.ai, or that I thought it was a great idea and went along with it.

Either way, I’m glad I took the book along to my vacation in Cabo. It turned out to be a page-turner. I couldn’t put it down, finishing it in three days and re-reading it a week later.

Now, 10 years after, I still think in terms of the characters and situations described in that book. Herbie is my favorite. In any job I’m at, I always make sure to know the Herbie in the systems I manage.

“The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim is another gem that is a must read for engineering leaders.