Alex Rogo has three months to save a failing manufacturing plant or watch it close. Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox tell the turnaround as a novel, following Rogo and his team as they stop trusting received wisdom about efficiency and start reasoning from cause and effect. Their breakthrough becomes the Theory of Constraints: every system is held back by a small number of bottlenecks, and improving anything else is wasted motion. The plant plot carries a genuine method, which is why business schools still assign it. Brisk and argument-driven, it teaches operations thinking without a single lecture.