In late 2009, Ching conducted a 60-minute recorded interview with eliyahu-goldratt during a masterclass event. The conversation centered on six lessons Goldratt had embedded in his novel "Isn't It Obvious?" — lessons he felt readers were systematically missing. The interview was later published as six-lessons-with-eli-goldratt (2017).
The conversation
Goldratt explained that "Isn't It Obvious?" — his TOC-for-retail novel — contained specific embedded lessons that went beyond the surface narrative, but that most readers extracted the surface story without grasping the underlying reasoning. The six lessons he described in the interview represent a kind of meta-commentary on his own pedagogical method: what he intended readers to learn versus what they actually took away.
For Ching, the conversation was an encounter with the primary source. Every concept in Ching's work traces to toc-for-software-development, which in turn traces to Goldratt's TOC — but this was direct, recorded dialogue with the originator. The interview gave Ching insight into Goldratt's thinking about the teaching of TOC, not just the content of TOC itself. This meta-level perspective on pedagogy reinforced Ching's commitment to narrative as a teaching vehicle.
Significance of timing
Goldratt died in June 2011 — less than two years after this interview. The conversation is therefore one of the later extended records of Goldratt working through TOC concepts with a practitioner. When Ching published it in 2017 as six-lessons-with-eli-goldratt, it had acquired additional value as a historical document: not just useful TOC content but a preserved voice of the founder near the end of his life.
The publication delay
The eight-year gap between the interview (2009) and the published book (2017) suggests that Ching did not immediately recognize the archival value of what he had recorded. The publication may have been prompted by the growing interest in Goldratt's work following "The Phoenix Project" (2013) and the TOC renaissance in software communities — a context that made a direct Goldratt interview more valuable than it might have seemed in 2009.