65. Short-Term Operating Goals

Concept

Once one has vision and strategy statements in place, the challenge is to find ways to measure progress along your strategic path toward your vision. Let’s call these short-term operating goals (STOGs). In other words, what are you going to measure to assess your progress? Many executives focus on measurements before they think about vision or strategy. For me, that’s bass-ackwards.

You have to be careful about what you measure lest you actually damage or destroy your strategic efforts. You will see in a couple of examples below how that can happen.

Identifying measures depends on some kind of control or accounting system. If you don’t collect data, you cannot measure progress. Hip pocket assessments are susceptible to self-deception and fantasy. By the same token, too many controls can stifle innovation and creativity. Another paradoxical balance that successful executives must navigate. See the chapter on Control.

Tim Gallwey, you will see in the chapter on him in the Change module used measurements as a central element in his change theory.⁵⁰ The adage, “people pay attention to what you measure” is the core principle there.

Example

I had a client once for whom about 80 percent of their business came in over the phone. A few people complained that it took too long to get through to a customer service representative (CSR). Management was concerned about this, so they decided to fix the problem. In order to raise customer satisfaction, they decided to measure time-to-answer for each CSR. They put a device on each CSR’s phone that would measure this and instituted a new rule, the 80/20 rule (not the Pareto version but perhaps inspired by it): they expected that 80 percent of calls would be answered within 20 seconds. What do you think happened to customer satisfaction ratings?

Yes, they plummeted. And the reason was that CSRs were putting people on hold so they could answer the phone within the 20 second guideline. That’s an example of how management’s choice of measures can actually damage or destroy their stated goals.

There was a plant manager in one of my seminars who said his management put 64 measures on him. He said he felt like Gulliver strapped down by the Lilliputians, unable to move, paralyzed. A linear program with 64 constraints would leave a very small field of choice. Clearly that’s what management wanted, virtually complete control.

On the individual level, I included reading books in my Intellectual strategy. As an STOG, I chose to keep track of the number of books I read in a year. This was consistent with my VABE, “Read or you will have nothing to say.” I started with an STOG of one book a month. After a couple of years, I was up, to my surprise, to 48 books a year. This, I thought, was pretty good, four books a month, done simply by reading 20 to 30 minutes a night before falling asleep. I mentioned this once in a class I was teaching. I asked people how many books a year they read. Most people said one or two or none. (That alone was a revealing insight.) One man raised his hand and said, “600.” I was shocked! Really? Yes, he said. It turned out he was an astro-physicist working at Oak Ridge labs. He didn’t watch television. He sat in his easy chair at night while his wife knitted. He had a stack of unread books on the left and read books on the right. He would read a book in an hour, skimming each page, capturing the main ideas, absorbing them, integrating them, and then repeat the process. Two books a night. 600 a year! Wow. I realized, as usual, that my efforts were quite humble by comparison!

Diagram

Challenge

⁵⁰ Tim Gallwey, The Inner Game of Work, https://amazon.com/Inner-Game-Work-Learning-Workplace-ebook/dp/B000FC1IT0/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1513182659&sr=8-3&keywords=tim+gallwey