Eliyahu Moshe Goldratt (1947–2011) was an Israeli physicist turned management theorist whose work permanently altered how practitioners think about organizational performance and constraint management.
Born in Israel in 1947, Goldratt earned a physics PhD and brought a scientist's insistence on finding root causes to the study of business systems. In the late 1970s he founded creative-output, where he developed OPT (Optimized Production Technology) scheduling software. The principles underlying OPT became the seed of what he would later formalize as the theory-of-constraints.
His 1984 novel the-goal, co-written with jeff-cox, brought those principles to a mass audience in narrative form. The book introduced the character of Jonah — a Socratic mentor figure — and the logic of five-focusing-steps. It remains one of the best-selling business books of all time.
Goldratt subsequently developed the thinking-processes — a suite of logical tools including the current-reality-tree, evaporating-cloud, and future-reality-tree — and pioneered throughput-accounting as an alternative to traditional cost-world metrics. He founded the goldratt-institute (formally the avraham-y-goldratt-institute) in 1986 to propagate and develop TOC globally.
His later works include beyond-the-goal (2005), a five-hour audio lecture series reflecting on two decades of TOC development. He died in 2011, leaving behind a body of work that continues to grow through practitioners like rami-goldratt, eli-schragenheim, and the broader TOC community organized around tocico.