In Search of; An Engineers Journey

Nathan is a forty something business owner, lost in his own thoughts, wondering where he is, until a chance encounter with someone who may have always visited the same pub as him, starts a conversation. Over the course of follow up discussions with this stranger, Tom, and his daughters and wife, Nathan begins to better understand the world he's found himself in and why even after he's done everything he thought he should, it has become increasingly difficult to succeed, but also what does succeeding actually mean? Nathan may have been hoping someone would turn up, out of the blue to fix his problems, but maybe the actual problem he needed to understand and solve had, until now, been out of sight. Following inspiration from Eli Goldratt's 'The Goal', this work uses a narrative style to introduce and explore financial, operations and economic concepts that most people are aware of, but many have never explored in detail. Rather than requiring a bachelor's degree in economics to understand, these concepts are introduced through accessible examples embedded within the story, to not only introduce but also explore the impact of these concepts on the individual and a business. While the book is fictitious, it is based upon the author's own professional experience, combined with his research to explore issues in detail and form ideas and suggestions for ways to overcome obstacles identified in the book. While fictitious, the work uses academic concepts as a foundation on which to build creative solutions, while also being constrained by academic integrity, as to not simply present ideas that sound good, but are realistically achievable. The aim of the book was to answer questions the author has never been able to fully answer within his own, operations management focused research, such as what is the aim of the business? or more broadly, 'what's the problem' the business is trying to deal with? What motivated writing the book was a short 4000 word peer review opinion piece published in January 2024 that brought together two concepts, but in the process of providing some answers, also opened a rather larger can of worms, that then needed to be explored. Rather than requiring the reviewing of many business and economics ideas and concepts, by doing a lot of this myself, evidenced by the multiple footnotes and lengthy bibliography, the book aims to be accessible while maintaining academic rigour, but also providing some direction for the reader's own future exploration of topics they find interesting, to hopefully explore further themselves.