Company Goals - Where Do I Find This Information?

Whether you're in a company or the company is a client, it is shockingly common to discover that very few people actually know the goals of their company/client!

How could this be?  I am not suggesting that no one at the automobile manufacturer understands that the goal is to sell more vehicles at greater profit.  But this is what I refer to as pushing a boat with a rope.  Obviously, no matter how much you “push” on a rope tied to a boat (unless it’s physically in contact with the vessel) you are not going to move it!  So goals such as the below are not inconceivable to the casual observer/employee:

·      Sell more cars

·      Sell more trucks

·      Reduce the cost of building a car by 10%

·      Reduce the cost of people used in building the cars

But what do any of the above mean?  I call the above “directly unachievable goals.”  They cannot simply be mandated.  You must apply the formula we discussed earlier of Y = f (x) in order to focus efforts and measure the results of those efforts on what makes selling more cars or reducing costs possible.

Since it is not uncommon to have no idea what your company/client achievable goals are, you have to discover what they are independently.  We'll discuss that in tomorrow's blog.

Let me interject here that senior management is not stupid.  It’s not as if they are ignorant of the Y = f (x) relationship!  They are just generally very ineffective or lousy communicators of these sub-goals to the rest of the company.  The irony is that they are often surprised at how little people are “on board” with their vision or plan when they have never really aligned and communicated what they are trying to accomplish!