It's a book from the 1980's about operational management. In particular, it focuses on physical manufacturing.
It's in the form of a fictitious personal tale. A plant manager struggles to save his plant from closure, and his marriage from falling apart.
The lesson is about lean management.
My main takeaway is the realization that when we try to optimize something, we focus on how to do something more efficiently. What more often is a problem is that people and processes are blocked from doing work. They spend a lot of time waiting and doing nothing. Focusing on reducing waits will produce better results than focusing on doing the work faster. Of course reducing the waits might mean doing some targeted piece of work faster. It could also mean doing better scheduling or focusing on other resource contention.
Recently I used this mindset to optimize a legacy DB struggling under the weight of a hodgepodge of unmaintained code. It worked wonderfully. Instead of fixing the slowest queries, focused on fixing the ones that block the most often. The result was that the DB was able to handle the workload after all.