Business & Strategy

"Improve client retention." "Strengthen the leadership bench." "Get better at project delivery." Every one of those is a wish with a verb in front of it. They sound like goals. They are not, because none of them can be met or missed on a specific day, which means none of them can be steered, and none of them can be the basis of an honest conversation. The fix is not more rigor or a better acronym. It is a date. Three of them. The Move Take the outcome and write what it looks

There is a particular meeting that every leadership team eventually sits in. The scoreboard says everyone won. The results say otherwise. Every department hit its goals. The company missed its year. Nobody in the room underperformed. Nobody slacked. And that is what makes it so disorienting, because the usual explanations do not apply. You cannot point at a person. There is no obvious failure to fix. Here is what is almost always going on. The Goals Were Reasonable. They Were

Ask a leader to name their best performer and they will answer immediately. Ask them to describe what good looks like in that person's role, without mentioning hours, effort, or availability, and watch what happens. The pause is the whole problem. Last month I wrote about how organizations default to measuring time because value was never defined. The response I heard most was a fair one. Fine, so how do I define it? Here is the answer, and it is smaller than people expect. F