Drew Greenblatt, the president of Marlin Steel has a nice appreciation of Eli Goldratt on the Inc. website, The Man Who Saved My Company | Inc.com. (Yes, Eli Goldratt died two years ago.)
He opens with the familiar struggle and goes on to talk about how he was able to pull his company out of the struggles with help from The Goal, and Theory of Constraints.
A few years after I’d bought a bagel basket factory in the late 1990s, I was in the gutter--beaten down by subsidized Chinese imports, substandard facilities and the squashing of the bagel business by the low-carb Atkins’ diet. I was searching for a way out, short of folding the business. ...
Goldratt was a physicist and management theorist whose iconic management book, The Goal, had already sold 3 million copies by then. His fictionalized account about how a beleaguered plant manager succeeds by discovering "lean manufacturing" is required reading not just on factory floors but in hospitals, schools, halls of government and corporate board rooms. That book--and Goldratt himself--were transformative for my company.
Interesting that Greenblatt continues to call it "lea manufacturing", eschewing the Theory of Constraints term altogether.