The three ‘goals’ to avoid

Last week I was honoured to sit in a meeting of a team that was assured of success. I say this with disgust though, as the group refused to clearly define what they were trying to achieve, specifically so they couldn’t fail. Sadly, it’s too easy to get away with this in a NFP environment.

So I thought I would write about the three most common areas of failure that I see among leaders.

1. Lack of goals

Don’t define desired outcomes, don’t define what success looks like, and especially don’t define what failure looks like. This means that you are absolutely assured of not failing. You can carry on about culture and process if you like, but culture and process without one eye on outcomes means you can end up with some really nasty results. After things go really bad, you tend to hear, “I was only following orders”. Employees of AWB, Securency and OneTel all thought they were doing a fabulous job.

2. Create small goals

If you create really small goals, it’s really easy to be successful. Unfortunately, you tend to get stuck in this cycle and tend to believe your own success so much, you don’t even notice the big opportunities that wave to you as they pass you by. Certainly Real Networks thought it was doing pretty well when it rejected Tony Fadell‘s idea for a content delivery system for MP3 players. Apple liked it and launched iTunes with its music player into a crowded market. And speaking of music, the record industry did really well for artists when protecting their revenue streams by suing Napster.  They now have a minor share in the digital music market.

3. Change your goals to suit your outcomes

The number one area of failure I see in start-ups is that they change their goals to match their outcomes. If you don’t get sales, you were just trying to validate a market. If you don’t get profits, you were just exercising your production systems. Blogger was a side project of Pyra Labs who were building an online project management and CRM tool. After it was bought by Google, Google let the founder Evan Williams, of Twitter fame, go.

If you set smart goals, you risk failure. You also learn and get better.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.