There is an interesting book genre, where the protagonist is a manager in a failing company. The story traces what they learn as they figure out what is wrong with the company internally. They're usually mostly focused on the actual business, but do have about 30% dedicated to the emotions and personalities involved.

Compared to a usual novel, they're very satisfying, because they're very practical. They're almost science fiction in their adherence to "hard"-ness. They're also extremely "genre".

The Examples I know of

• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim et al
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• ?The Toyota Way - this is related, but isn't actually a novelization

They both take pains to explain some non-obvious (to me) assembly line processes.

• Rate limiting by slowest step. This is pretty obvious - if production requires step A (1 unit/sec) and then step B (10 units/sec), optimization of B will have zero effect on your total throughput.
• Why low inventory is good - this is harder to explain. A combination of carrying costs, and it implies that you are spending any time on B before it is needed.

They also show something I've often found to be true - people take past rates of process speed as gospel and rarely go back to theoretical limitations to figure out why it takes that long. If X historically takes 12 hours, people believe it - even though they all have CS degrees, and the process apparently should take ~1ms to actually complete. People don't regularly refer to the known constraints of a system when evaluating it.

When looking at the speed of a process with a few steps, knowing their constraints should be as basic as knowing their names.