Making Your Goals Means Making A Plan
June 28, 2012 By
Okay, all you golfers—ever played a skins game? In simple terms: players during a round of golf wager on the best score for a single hole. If there’s a tie, the “pot” rolls over to the next hole. One result of a skins game can be to up the ante on each hole. The backlash is taking your eye off the long haul. In a skins game, you play for short-term stakes. As a result, strategy goes out the window.
Unfortunately, some people run their businesses that way. They muddle along in a never-ending skins game. This doesn’t just happen in tiny companies. An insider at a famous blue-chip giant once quipped: “Our idea of long-term planning here is deciding what we’ll do after lunch.”
Anyone who has participated in a skins game on a golf course knows the painstaking attention paid to the line of every putt. It’s a lot like what Peter Drucker describes as “the last of the deadly sins” of business, which he defines as “feeding problems and starving opportunities.”
Peter Drucker has long been considered the definitive authority on business planning. His principles are still widely used decades after his revolutionary writing on the concept of “Management by Objectives.” Drucker sorted out a baffling world.
Planning boils down to two fundamental processes: goals and objectives. It is important to distinguish between the two. Goals are considered the purely quantitative and mostly financial targets. Objectives are more qualitative and elusive.1
Make your goals, and you stay in business. Advance your objectives and you build a business worth having. The distinction between goals and objectives is hardly pure. Often objectives have quantitative measures attached to them as well. But they are rarely just numerical yardsticks.
To read the entire article from Harvey Mackay.com
http://harveymackay.com/column/making-your-goals-means-making-a-plan/
1 Samuel 2:30 — Those who honor me, I will honor.
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