Book excerpt: The motivation for this book came out of a shared belief that what passed as 'theory' in operations management (OM) was all too often inadequate. In one respect, OM scholars were bending over backwards to make theories from other fields fit our research problems. In another, questionable assumptions were being used to apply mathematics to OM problems. This book provides a succinct summary of the core knowledge of OM through a set of ten fundamental principles that bring together a century of operations management thinking, and which cover all basic aspects of the core teaching covered at Master's level.