Tag Archives: purpose

Objectives and Agendas

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Whose Objectives are You Pursuing, by Walter McIntyre

Every person and every organization has objectives and a purpose.  I am not speaking of the ones individuals profess or those an organization posts on their lobby wall.  It is the ones you observe in action that count.  These objectives, which are always related to an agenda, are not that hard to see and hear if you are paying attention.

I am fortunate to have been involved in leading a business turn around twice in my career.  In both cases individual agendas and objectives were subverting the business’s success.   In both cases, changing the focus of specific individuals, or removing the individuals from the business, became the turning point for business success.

You have to pay attention to what people say, and what they do, to see past the facade. To hear someone say they want to see certain business metrics improve, but their actions are about promoting themselves,  is a dead giveaway.  These folks will sub-optimize the business to accomplish their personal agendas.

It is a characteristic of highly successful individuals that they work hard to be the best at whatever they are doing.  They move up the ladder by way of out-working and out-learning everyone else.  They build a group of faithful followers who trust that the individual will give credit where credit is due and share in the benefits that success provides.  They also take ownership of failures instead of blame shifting or excuses.

If want to build a successful organization, staff it with folks that share your vision and are willing to fulfill their own objectives by way of making the vision a reality.  Avoid folks who are looking to promote themselves at the expense of others and the vision.

As for advice, I tend to avoid folks who are seeking a title or pay level.  They tend to see the business as a means to an end.  They check out as soon as they believe their agenda looks unattainable.  Even though I have held the titles of COO and CEO in my career, I never sought them.  They came as a result of working my tail off to make vision a reality and business successful.

Voice of the Business

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Some of the first questions that a business must answer are:

• Why do we exist?
• Who are our customers?
• What is our mission or purpose?
• What is our vision?

To understand the importance of the answers to these questions, we must first understand that different stakeholders in a business have different perspectives. The stockholders wish to get a return on their investment. Workers wish to get a good wage for their work. Managers and officers wish to meet the business performance metrics set forth by the owners (stockholders, etc). The community wishes to have a neighbor that provides jobs, pays taxes, supports the community, and has no negative environmental impact. These are just a few.

Understanding the answers to these questions from the stakeholders’ perspective helps to define problem areas within the business and its ambient environment. It allows the business to have clearer vision. In the final analysis though, there are two high level purposes of a business. In a capitalistic society, businesses exist to make money, to make a profit. Without this, the business would not exist. Secondly, when the business is profitable, it ideally gives back stability to the community in which it exists.

When a business correctly defines its problem areas, from the customer and business points of view, it is ready to take the next step to improve processes connected to the problem areas.

So what does process improvement mean to the business? It means lower cost, higher efficiency, and higher profits. These manifest themselves in higher customer satisfaction, improved market share, and larger margins. The tie between customer satisfaction and profitability is evident.

Similar metrics apply to organizations like non-profits. For them the metrics may be lower cost and higher efficiency. These may manifest themselves as lower dependence on outside funding and improved margins. The commonality between businesses and non-profits is that the focus is upon doing more with less, thus returning more margin to the stakeholders and more value to the customers.

These bottom-line metrics in a healthy business are in alignment with their strategic planning. Furthermore, when strategic planning is in alignment with customer expectations, improvement projects will improve customer satisfaction and profitability.