Seven million copies sold. Required reading for Jeff Bezos's top executives. Written in 1984 as a novel about a factory — and it's still exposing the single biggest reason your business is stuck.

In this episode, Todd Hagopian — the original Stagnation Assassin — breaks down "The Goal" by Eliyahu Goldratt, the book that introduced the Theory of Constraints and forever changed how operators think about throughput, bottlenecks, and the dangerous fiction that being busy means being productive.

Todd delivers the full Stagnation Assassin treatment: what the book gets right (the throughput-first mindset, the Five Focusing Steps, the boy scout hike metaphor), what it gets wrong (manufacturing tunnel vision, the marriage subplot, and a missing chapter on organizational politics), and whether it still deserves a permanent spot on your shelf.

STAGNATION VERDICT: 4 Kills out of 5

Key topics covered:

• The Theory of Constraints and the Five Focusing Steps
• Why your system only cares about the constraint — not how hard you're working
• The boy scout hike: why statistical fluctuations don't average out, they accumulate
• Throughput, inventory, and operating expense — the only 3 metrics that matter
• Why Goldratt's manufacturing framing has kept this weapon off the radar of leaders who need it most

Grab Todd's book "The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox" at toddhagopian.com

Subscribe to the Stagnation Assassin Show and visit stagnationassassins.com

While you're comfortable in your ignorance, your competitors wake up every day studying you. They know your strengths because they're avoiding them. They know your weaknesses because they're exploiting them. I asked a leadership team their competitor's lead time. Silence. "Four weeks?" someone guessed. It had been four weeks for eight months—and they didn't know. That's not competition—that's getting mugged with your eyes closed.

The Pathetic Pantomime

You've been losing market share to this competitor for years and can't answer basic questions about how they operate. Their warranty claim rate? Nobody knew. Manufacturing costs? Nothing. But I guarantee they know everything about you—that's why they're winning.

Customer obsession failure is even worse. B2B companies study direct customers while ignoring end consumers who determine whether those customers succeed.

When selling shopping carts, grocery stores wanted five-year replacement cycles. We argued for three—wheels go bad, rust develops. They didn't care about $45 commodity items. So we interviewed actual shoppers. Found 82% had abandoned shopping trips because of bad carts. We calculated hundreds of thousands in lost revenue per store annually. Result? They started buying whole fleets rather than one cart at a time. Revenue exploded.

Competitor intelligence failure is equally devastating. You track their pricing and press releases—surface-level intelligence everyone has. Meanwhile, they know your real manufacturing costs and which customers are unhappy.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Todd Hagopian reveals Magnificent Obsession—systematic intelligence on customers and competitors at levels most organizations never attempt.

Customer Obsession: Go beyond B2B buyers to actual end users. Commission quick studies—150 interviews, few thousand dollars. Ask what frustrates them and what workarounds they've created.

Competitor Obsession: Dissect business models, not just products. Buy competitor products and tear down completely. One analysis revealed a competitor was vulnerable below 2,400 units monthly—we exploited it.

Critical boundary: 5% of capacity on intelligence, 95% on execution. The 30-Day Rule—intelligence to action in 30 days maximum.

Your Assignment

Schedule 10 end-user conversations this week. Then buy your top competitor's product and tear it apart.

Visit https://stagnationassassins.com and Declare WAR on Stagnation.

About The Podcaster

Todd Hagopian has led five corporate transformations generating $2B+ in shareholder value. Author of The Unfair Advantage (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FV6QMWBX). Featured 30+ times on Forbes.com, Fox Business, and NPR.

I built a spreadsheet at 2 a.m. that revealed a company's darkest secret. 100 customer-product combinations generated 150% of their profit, while 1,700 combinations destroyed the other 50%. That's 5% creating all the value while 95% burned it down. Your P&L is lying because traditional accounting shows positive margins on products that are actually corporate cancer consuming your company from the inside out.

The Profit-Pulverizing Pandemic

Your division is losing $5 million a year. Yet every business review shows positive gross margins across the portfolio. Quality improving, customer satisfaction rising, market share stable—but bleeding money every day.

I pulled financial data and built what nobody had built before—not because they couldn't, but because they didn't want to see the answer. Individual profitability for every customer buying every product. By 8:30 a.m., the truth was devastating.

Here's why your accounting lies: traditional cost allocation was designed for mass production factories making one product. It's completely wrong when complexity varies dramatically. That "profitable" $1,000 transaction? Add setup costs, engineering support, quality inspections, inventory carrying costs, management time. True profit: negative $34,500. Your standard accounting showed 40% gross margin because it didn't allocate activity costs.

The value destroyers clustered predictably: small customers buying customized products, large customers buying commodities at brutal pricing, specialty configurations requiring engineering support exceeding gross margins by three to five times. Every one made sense in isolation—"strategic relationship," "protecting share," "maintaining full product line"—every excuse masking systematic value destruction.

Four Deadly Myths Keeping You Trapped

One: All revenue is good revenue. Wrong—revenue costing more to generate than it returns is organizational cancer. Two: Strategic customers will grow eventually. Customers trained to expect low prices never suddenly pay premium. Three: We need the full product line. No—customers want specific solutions, not breadth. Four: Market share matters most. Unprofitable market share is worse than no share.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Todd Hagopian reveals the 80/20 Matrix—two-dimensional analysis exposing what one-dimensional Pareto misses. Plot customer-product combinations, not just customers or products. Four quadrants emerge.

Quadrant One: Profit Engine—top 20% customers buying top 20% products. These generate 140-200% of profit. Give them everything.

Quadrant Four: Value Destroyers—bottom 80% customers buying bottom 80% products. These destroy 50-100% of profit. Implement 40-60% price increase immediately.

You'll also get 80/20 Squared: within your top 20%, the top 20% of that (4% of combinations) generates about 64% of total profit. Fifteen combinations out of 1,800 generated over half the company's profit.

Three-Wave Implementation transforms your portfolio in 90 days. Results: revenue down 23% year one, profit up 187%. Year two: revenue recovered, profit climbed higher.

Your Assignment

Build a rough 80/20 matrix this week. Identify obvious Quadrant 4 value destroyers everyone knows lose money but nobody will kill. Calculate what happens if you raise prices 50% tomorrow.

Transformation starts with strategic subtraction, not desperate addition.

Visit https://stagnationassassins.com and Declare WAR on Stagnation.

About The Podcaster

Todd Hagopian has led five corporate transformations generating $2B+ in shareholder value. Author of The Unfair Advantage (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FV6QMWBX). Featured 30+ times on Forbes.com, Fox Business, and NPR.