Today, I will write about strategy and goals.
Here is my theory:
If you have poor goals, the strategy cannot be good, either.
🙂 Except if you are as lucky as Gustav Gans
First and foremost: about goals!
On a seminar for personnel management, I learned that goals should be SMART:
S for specific
There must be a specified goal.
M for manageable
There must be a realistic chance that the goal is manageable.
A for attractive
The person given the task (?) should find the goal interesting and desirable.
R for realistic
The goal must be objectively and subjectively possible to achieve.
T for timed
There must be a specific date for the delivery.
That made sense to me, so I immediately became a fanatic of smart goals.
As time went by, I realized that smart goals are rubbish!
And consequently, I will demand from now on that a good goal must be WHOLESOME!
W for worthy
Goals must be oriented towards a worthy cause. Stakeholder value and self-elevation are not good enough.
H for honourable
No matter what you do, your general attitude when deciding about your goals should be an honourable one.
O for open-minded
Your goals should always leave room for creative ideas.
L for lasting
If a goal is not based on a lasting and long-standing value, you should reconsider.
E for emotional, entrepreneurial
Goals must move more than just the ratio of a person. It is important that they can be transported through emotions. The goal must also move something profound: a project, a special development or a relevant change
S for sustainable
Sustainability as a value is (and, as I think, always has been) to be demanded.
O for opportune
Goals that present themselves rationally and reasonably are mostly offering a good opportunity.
M for meaningful
Your employees will thank you for setting the goals of a project in a meaningful way.
E for elemental
Goals should be based on what is natural and elemental, rather than artificial.
Here is an alternative list of how to spell what goals should be: HEALTHFUL
H for honourable.
E for emotional, entrepreneurial, elemental.
A for artless, authentic.
L for lasting.
T for tangible, traceable.
H for humane.
F for free from unnecessary restrictions.
U for unstudied.
L for long-standing.
So a goal must be compositional and sincere, emotional, realistic and sexy, entrepreneurial, sustainable, natural and comprehensible – and, last not least, – it must be presentable!
If you paid attention and have some dialectical schooling, you will have noticed: I cheated a little. Of course, the “smart goals” are taken from the personnel sector; the “wholesome goals” originate with the entrepreneurial concept.
And in those two worlds, the term “goal” has totally different meanings. It is one of those traps we keep falling into when trying to communicate. Once in a while, it makes us face a pile of shards.
For me, there was also another reason for discarding the “smart” goals. Even when talking the personnel sector! After all, goal formulations are based on an idea of man that assumes people can be controlled and motivated by offering them artfully constructed financial carrots and incentive.
That is something I do not appreciate. I also think it is basically the wrong approach. As I see it, this approach would not even work with horses if you tied the bucket of oat around their necks. Consequently, I also demand that enterprises should adhere to the “wholesome“ goals when dealing with people, colleagues or employees.
Let me add a few more “bad” (sub-optimal) goals:
Quantity goals! X more turnover, Y more results, Z more employees …
Goals pushed by identity numbers! More productivity by X, more performance through profiling with Y… (X, Y, Z for example as per cent numbers)
Goals based on speculation In 2011, the gold price will increase again … In 2011, the economy will … The tool of the future is …
And here are some, as I see it, “good” (optimum) goals:
Quality goals We want to offer our employees continued education, tighten/loosen our service scope, listen more carefully to what our customers say, and work internally in a way that would not embarrass us if our customers were to watch us at any time.
Future goals We encourage subsidiary enterprises for some market or other, we develop a strong competence in some area or other, we learn to get even more customer-oriented.
Compositional Goals We create new research and development activities, renew our appearance for customers, increase our visibility on the market, improve the cost-achievement relation.
Good goals will help to develop a good strategy. And then they are easy to implement.
If you manage to develop a good strategy after having started with a poor goal, you must be as lucky as Gustav Gans. And if you have that, there is nothing you can do wrong, anyway!
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
The article contains parts of my presentation:
Strategy without goal
About the difficulties of defining reasonable goals for an enterprise and developing good strategies. Solutions included!
In the future, I will write more often about the chain goals – strategy – planning – operation.
P.S.1
All articles of my entrepreneur’s diary can be found in the DrehscheibeDrehscheibe!
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