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Business goals 101
By Jon Rappoport
This is a brief version of a much larger exploration of business operations and objectives.
With some clients in my consulting practice, I find this focus is paramount.
First of all, what is a particular business trying to do?
What is its basic purpose? That answer can only be supplied by the
person who heads up the company. He is the beginning and end of that
vision.
And then, when the goal is clear, how is it going to be achieved?
This latter question often leads to mistakes, the most prominent of which is over-organization or badly designed organization.
Organization should be a function of the primary purpose, not a stand-alone structure that mimics other familiar patterns.
What do you need to do, in order to get where you want to go? And who needs to do it?
Think of organization as a collection of project teams. Each
team has a leader, and each leader works to attain a "sub-goal." If all
the teams succeed, the major goal is achieved. That's the plot, the
story-line, the best prediction, the best estimate.
These teams are at the heart of a business operation.
Realizing that, the head of the business may see he has to
radically reorganize his company. His present pattern is all wrong. It's
traditional, bulky, redundant, wasteful, annoying, thoughtless, and
grossly distracting.
In fact, this can get so bad the organization becomes a maze.
People are lost in it. Functions circle around and come back to their
starting points.
At the extreme, you would see what I saw, many years ago,
when I was called in to assess a small start-up. A dozen people were
sitting at desks in a large room. They all had titles. They sat there
and looked at paper. They basically pushed paper from one desk to
another. Around and around it went. That's all that was going on. Of
course, no one would admit it---least of all the CEO. He was quite proud
of having designed these titles and jobs to achieve his primary
objective. And theoretically, he talked a good game. But really, the
set-up was a total failure. There weren't any project leaders or teams.
No one was actually projecting the sale of anything. It was a giant
bubble.
Many businesses are structured so their functions mesh with
each other---but the primary goal is left out in the cold. Too much
focus turns to the implementation of non-productive Pattern.
I have written before about the obsession for systems. You
could liken it to the building of a house. The owner is fixated on
installing all the proper functions, and in the end what he has is a
bunch of adjacent spaces that really have nothing to do with the house
he wanted in the first place. His primary vision is gone and buried.
I once worked with a CEO client who was drowning in his own
company. He couldn't see his way in or out. I told him we were going to
have a series of conversations during which he would re-build, as it
were, his business from scratch. From the ground up. From nothing.
Starting with his primary goal and vision.
Eventually, in our dialogue, he reconstructed, in a new way,
what his company would have to do, in order to reach the goal. What his
company would look like, what projects it would undertake, who would
undertake them---and all this was based on action, not mindless
organization.
He was able to dump his obsession for systems. He was able to
look at his future without peering through an arbitrary lens of
over-organization. He was able to shake off years of empty stagnation.
Most profoundly, he was able to scrape away the accumulated veneer of shallow cynicism, in which he'd coated his own dreams.
And when he did that, his imagination came back to him. He could live with new energy.
He could feel the future he was, in fact, inventing.
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