Why is it so important to understand what company goals are? Aren’t my goals more important than my customers’ goals?
The primary goal of (almost) every company is:
To make money
This sounds simple but it’s sometimes hard to keep in mind when the bullets are flying.
Especially in large enterprises, it is common to break down the goals into sub-goals such as to improve quality, increase innovation, reduce downtime, increase throughput, improve OEE, etc. which replace the main goal of the overall company (make money) during day-to-day operations.
While focusing the daily operations on optimizing them separately, companies are often not able to realize their full potential.
The sum of the local optima is not the global optima
To keep track of the performance of separate entities in the organization, each of the goals gets reported upwards every month or two (sometimes even quarterly).
This leads to a problem:
Latency is introduced into the system. And latency tends to make systems unstable.
Typically the reporting of sub-goals is done along with the goals of profit and cost.
In a perfect world, each hierarchy would break down the task to reach a goal into objectives the dedicated entity can influence.
In an imperfect world this introduces another problem:
Goals are not specific enough to be tensionable for the empowered product teams to be translated into digital measures such as “use per user of an app“.
Goals must consistently support overarching goals, starting from vision down to the products of a company and the actual measures in a product have to provide information of the status of the companies goals in real-time.