Business Objectives! After wishing friends and colleagues a happy and successful 2016 it’s time to get down to business.
Objective setting is a very important part of our business life and it’s time to think about setting them for your team and yourself. This made me think of situations where it was necessary to call in the Impossible Missions Unit to help achieve objectives.
What’s the most impossible business objective you’ve ever been given?
I used to work with someone who was responsible for the effluent plant at a chemical site in the UK. There was an open effluent pit that received waste from a number of production units. My colleague was responsible for treating the total waste by a variety of processes.
His main objective was to minimise the amount of waste water pumped off site as this was a significant cost in our P&L. However the effluent pit was open to the elements and would fill up with rainwater during the worst of the English weather.
Even Tom Cruise would struggle to stop it raining! No matter how my colleague argued he never managed to get flexibility on this objective.
Do you remember CRT televisions? I worked for a company that had supplied this industry for many years and had made good profits from their sales. We all realised that the application was going to die and LED and plasma took over but I was still given a ‘stretch target’ to make considerable sales to the remaining CRT producers.
The market was flooded with cheap flat screen TVs and the CRT producers were bankrupt within 6 months. No stretch target for me!
Please share your worst business objectives and take some time to think about setting them for your team this year.