Foundations
Foundations carry the vocabulary a TOC practitioner must hold steady before any other section makes sense. The system the practitioner has been given standing to improve, the goal that system’s owners set, the constraint that limits its production of goal units, the three global measures — throughput, inventory, operating expense — and the Five Focusing Steps that turn the measures into operational discipline together form the working language Goldratt asked the field to use.
The entries here name the concepts every other application specializes. System, The Goal, Constraint, Throughput, Inventory, and Operating Expense are vocabulary the rest of the body of knowledge relies on. The Five Focusing Steps, POOGI, Subordination, Exploitation Without Elevation, Constraint Type Identification, Policy Constraint, Strategic Constraint, and Inherent Simplicity are the operational and philosophical core: how the discipline works, what kind of constraint a practitioner is looking at, where leadership chooses to hold the binding limit over the long run, and why a single binding constraint is a real property of well-defined systems rather than a simplification.
Three antipatterns live inline here next to the framework they oppose. Local Optimization, Improving Non-Constraints, and Breaking the Wrong Constraint are the failure modes the Five Focusing Steps and constraint-type identification are designed to prevent — placed in this section so readers see the antipattern next to the move whose absence produces it. The Antipatterns Index sub-page lists every antipattern in the book with a one-line summary and a link to the inline entry, so “TOC antipatterns” as a category search lands somewhere findable.
A practical reading path starts with System for the unit every later concept presupposes, The Goal for the philosophical anchor every constraint identification depends on, Constraint and Throughput for the vocabulary anchors, Five Focusing Steps for the operational core, Subordination for the step practitioners most commonly skip, Constraint Type Identification for the distinction that prevents the most expensive wrong turn (treating a policy constraint as a physical one), and Inherent Simplicity for the philosophical position that justifies TOC’s single-constraint focus. The remaining entries fill in the measurement and antipattern vocabulary that later sections specialize.