Seeing the End Result

by Miller Heiman

MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, whose writings on feedback were the foundation of modern systems analysis, used to distinguish between "know-how" and "know-what." It was a lot easier, he said, to develop the former than the latter–yet without "know-what," "know-how" didn’t count. To achieve anything of substance, Wiener said, you had to keep the purpose of your activity in mind. Knowing how to run a machine, a political campaign, or a business enterprise was important, sure. But all the technical or management expertise in the world wouldn’t help you if you forgot what you were running it for.

In a less esoteric arena, Vince Lombardi once made the same point. John Madden asked the Hall of Fame Green Bay Packers coach to define the difference between a good coach and a bad coach. Lombardi’s response: "It’s knowing what the end result looks like. The poor coaches don’t have a clear picture of the end. Good coaches do."

What is true in systems theory and football is also true in business. You can have the latest Star Wars production system and the most gut-busting sales force in the world. Neither one will mean anything strategically unless everybody on your account team clearly sees the "end result" he or she is working for–in other words, unless everyone sees where the strategy is going.

Like other observers of corporate enterprise, when we speak of "end results," we use the term goals. Unlike most observers, however, we take a uniquely realistic approach to goal-setting.

In establishing goals–especially sales goals–most businesses are anything but realistic. Typically, they set corporate goals that are impossibly vague ("Increase our market share") while setting sales goals that are just as impossibly precise ("Boost fall quarter revenues by 7.5 percent"). This double confusion leads them, not infrequently, into a fool’s paradise of wish fulfillment where true goals are subordinated to computer-assisted "projections" that bear about as much relation to real end results as the sizzle does to a steak.

In this fool’s paradise, the typical "goal" is unrealistic in three ways.

First, it’s unnecessarily quantitative. Focused to a truly mind-boggling degree on cash-flow charts and market projection specs, businesses attempt to operate by the numbers and to insist that all goals must be measurable.

Second, it’s generated by past rather than current sales realities–so that at the very best it can never be more than a sophisticated guess.

And, third, it’s too self-centered. Not as in "selfish" but as in "I can’t see why this account won’t let us in–don’t they see how much we want their business?" Most corporate goal-setting forgets the cardinal rule that the account ultimately decides whether or not your goals are met–and that it decides on the basis of its needs, not yours.

Certain goals are indeed quantifiable, but most business goals cannot be "counted" in the same way you count capital expenditures or personnel. This is rank heresy in an age where 10-year-olds own pocket calculators. But it’s true. You can measure revenue, and payroll, and operating costs. But in the long-term management of your accounts, true goals don’t appear on the spreadsheets.

Part of the reason lies in that familiar phrase "long-term." We define goals as desired "positions," and because solid positioning never happens overnight, we say that the end results you should be aiming for will typically take a year or more to achieve. If you’re looking at an accomplishment that you expect to be done in six weeks, chances are it’s what we call an objective, not a goal.

Adapted from Successful Large Account Management Robert Miller and Stephen E. Heiman with Tad Tuleja © 1991 by Miller Heiman, Inc., All rights reserved with permission of Warner Books. Inc.