Читать книгу Business Plans For Dummies - Paul Tiffany - Страница 71

After you complete a mission statement, your business goals lay out a basic itinerary for achieving your mission. Goals are broad business results that your company absolutely commits to attaining.

Goals are typically stated in terms of general business intentions. You may define your company’s goals by using phrases such as “becoming the market leader” or “being the low-cost provider of choice.” These aims clearly focus the company’s activities without being so narrowly defined that they stifle creativity or limit flexibility.

In working toward set goals, your company must be willing to come up with the resources — the money and the people — required to attain the intended results. The goals that you set for your company should ultimately dictate your business choices throughout your organization and may take years to achieve. Goals should forge an unbreakable link between your company’s actions and its mission.

Simply setting a general goal for your company isn’t the end of the story; you also need to spend time thinking about how to get there. So, your company must follow up its goal with a series of objectives: operational statements that specify exactly what you must do to reach the goal. You should attach numbers and dates to objectives, which may involve weeks, months, or sometimes even years of effort. Example: We will achieve sales revenue of $10 million by 2024. They help you realize when you reach a given objective.

Objectives never stand alone. They flow directly from your mission and your values and vision (see Chapter 3), and outside the context of their larger goals, they have little meaning. In fact, objectives can be downright confusing.

The goal “Improve employee morale,” for example, is much too general without specific objectives to back it up. And you can misinterpret the objective “Reduce employee grievances by 35 percent over the coming year” if you state it by itself. (One way to achieve this objective is to terminate some employees and terrorize the rest of the workforce.) When you take the goal and objective together, however, their meanings become clear.

Want an easy way to keep the difference between goals and objectives straight? Remember the acronym GOWN: G for goals, O for objectives, W for words, and N for numbers. For goals, we use words — sketching in the broad picture. For objectives, we use numbers — filling in the specific details. For example, your firm might set a goal of becoming “the perceived quality leader” in its space. But to get there, it might want to define an objective of “reducing errors in the shipping department to less than 1 percent during the next six months.” The latter gives specificity to the generic statement of the prior and, as such, provides a concrete guide for action to those charged with getting the job done.

If you already use different definitions for goals and objectives, don’t worry; you’re not going crazy. What we do find crazy is the lack of any standard definition of terms when it comes to business planning in all its areas and topics (some firms out there are still trying to differentiate between vision, values, and mission). The important task is to settle on the definitions that you want to use and stick with them in a consistent manner, communicating these clearly to everyone in the organization. You may even want to add in a glossary at the end of your business plan that specifies the key terms used. That way you prevent any unnecessary confusion within your company.