Every business has objectives. When high-performance organizations establish their vision, they normally differentiate between strategic goals and imperatives. In many businesses I work with, there is a strategy to diversify into additional markets. In one midsized family-owned business I worked with, the president and VP of sales were brothers. These two were of the same cloth, aggressive and energetic and devoted to business growth. While this is all good, the planning process was not as robust as it should have been. Unfortunately their aggressive approach led to a list of business imperatives about two pages long. This business never finished executing the list. There was also a prioritization issue in their business because all of the imperatives, by design, were of top importance. This led to questions in the organization about what was most important because there were not enough resources to do all of it.

Figure 3.3: Business planning.

Most would agree that all intelligent managers can think of helpful things to do. In fact, the real problem with bulk intelligence is that, often, too many things are dreamed up. Said a different way, lots of good people can name the 20 things a company needs to do for competitive advantage. The real leaders among us are the ones that can pick the 5 or 10 goals a company should and will really do. When resources are focused and goals are prioritized in this manner, more actually gets done at the end of the day. Business imperatives...