"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