Fundamentals of Level Three Leadership

65. Short-Term Operating Goals

Concept

Once one has vision and strategy statements in place, the challenge is to find ways to measure progress along your strategic path toward your vision. Let’s call these short-term operating goals (STOGs). In other words, what are you going to measure to assess your progress? Many executives focus on measurements before they think about vision or strategy. For me, that’s bass-ackwards.

You have to be careful about what you measure lest you actually damage or destroy your strategic efforts. You will see in a couple of examples below how that can happen.

Identifying measures depends on some kind of control or accounting system. If you don’t collect data, you cannot measure progress. Hip pocket assessments are ...