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 fol-
low 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 val-
ues 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, how-
ever, 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 objec-
tives, 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 defini-
tion 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 mis-
sion). 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 unnec-
essary confusion within your company.

CHAPTER 4 Charting the Proper Course 59