A speech delivered by eliyahu-goldratt at the APICS (American Production and Inventory Control Society) international conference in autumn 1983 — a full year before the-goal was published. This makes it one of the earliest public articulations of what would become theory-of-constraints. The speech was provocative by design: Goldratt argued that traditional cost accounting systems were not merely inadequate but actively destructive, driving managers to optimize locally at the expense of system-wide throughput. The claim that cost accounting was "public enemy number one" directly challenged the accounting profession and foreshadowed the decades-long tension between TOC's throughput-accounting and conventional management accounting that Goldratt would develop in the-haystack-syndrome (1990).
The speech was controversial enough that Goldratt was invited to re-address the topic the following year at the national conference of the Management Accountants association. This chronology matters: it shows that Goldratt was already making bold, confrontational claims about management measurement before The Goal existed. The novel didn't create the controversy — it amplified a fight Goldratt had already picked. The speech belongs to the physics-and-opt-origins era, when Goldratt was transitioning from creative-output's OPT scheduling software to a broader critique of management philosophy. It represents the origin of the policy-constraints concept — the insight that bad rules do more damage than physical bottlenecks.