Idea 8: Set professional business goals

As you have seen, your strategic aims result from asking these questions:

• Where are we now?
• Where do we want to be in three or five years' time?
• What strengths and weaknesses do we have?
• How can we improve?
• Can we get to where we want to be?

Similar to setting personal goals/objectives, delineate your professional business goals/objectives (for your organization and, perhaps separately, for yourself at work):

1. What are the key long-term goals/objectives?
2. What are the five-year goals/objectives?
3. What are the one-year goals/objectives?

Then plans and strategies have to be addressed, as in:

1. Identifying obstacles and opportunities.
2. Analyzing ways/means to achieve goals/objectives despite/because of those obstacles/opportunities.

Planning answers the question: How are we going to achieve a particular task, meet a goal or reach an objective? How leads to who, what and when? You can then set out your strategy for achieving:

• Short-term goals/objectives – for one year.
• Medium-term goals/objectives – for five years.
• Long-term goals/objectives.

Goals/objectives must be clear, specific, measurable, attainable, written, time-bounded, realistic, challenging, agreed, consistent, worthwhile and participative.

Attaining goals/objectives brings into play strategy and planning, for which you need imagination, a sense of reality, the power of analysis and what has been described as helicopter vision (the ability to see matters in detail, but from a higher perspective).

Of course, you can't spend all your time planning – you need to attain the right balance between planning and implementation. Planning saves time at the strategic and operational level and the key principle is that every moment spent planning saves three or four moments in execution.