The Goal

Overview

What is the goal for any organization? Depending on whom you ask you will most likely get a different answer. Many times companies have different goals for various divisions, departments, or even individuals which may help incentivize performance, but do these “smaller” goals align with the organization’s goal? Most of the time, these goals are not aligned with the organization’s overall goal because they don’t have a clear understanding of the organizational goal. If you do not have a clear line of sight to the goal, how do you know whether you have the right processes in place to positively impact it along with the right measures in place to achieve it? So what is the goal? To make money.

This was the case with Alex Rogo in the book The Goal. Alex, who is a manufacturing plant manager, must improve his factory’s performance (UniWare) within 3 months in order to avoid a shutdown by the parent organization, UniCo. He realizes very early in his discovery process that productivity within his plant must bring him closer to UniCo’s overall goal. Every action that doesn’t bring him closer to the goal is not considered productive and shouldn’t be pursued. He identifies the key drivers to achieve the goal as throughput, inventory and operating expense. All three of these need to be optimized simultaneously. These were key insights for Alex and are heralded as key operating management principles in business today.

Roadmap for Success

As Alex is formulating his action plan, he is counseled by a former colleague, Jonah, who emphasizes that an organization can only have one goal. Therefore, he identified his most critical task before he initiated any process improvement or change: define the goal and create measures to ensure all effort is directed toward achieving the goal. Simply stated, UniCo’s goal is: “To increase net profit, while simultaneously increasing ROI, while simultaneously increasing cash flow.” In further detail,...