Eliyahu M. Goldratt

An Israeli physicist who moved into manufacturing management and then wrote The Goal in 1984 as a novel, on the theory that nobody reads management textbooks properly. A plant manager has three months to save his factory and learns to find the bottleneck.

The Theory of Constraints that came out of it is simple to state and difficult to apply: any system is limited by one constraint at a time, so improving anything else is waste. It is still assigned in operations courses four decades on, and Critical Chain later pushed the same argument into project management.