I was working in manufacturing at the time I read The Goal, and I didn't get what was so special about it either. Having done JIT, time studies / line balancing, PERT/CPM, and other tools in the industrial engineering trade, I didn't think there was anything revolutionary about it. Maybe for those operating at an abstract level of operations management it was novel, but for those of us in the boots-on-the-ground mode, it was largely a rehash of existing ideas.
