Richard Reeves is a distinguished thinker who writes regularly and elegantly in Management Today. And he makes a good point in January's edition in his piece 'The trouble with targets'. The essence of the argument here is that too many organisations overdo it on targets, and that the subsequent target overload drives people (and organisations) crazy.

We see this all the time, with our clients in both the private sector and government.  In his piece Reeves refers us to the all-consuming fervour for benchmarks, metrics, scorecards and key performance indicators (KPIs).  His pinpointing of the danger of 'targetology' is spot on - that in creating endless, murky objectives and targets, one actually disenfranchises and disengages people and organisations rather than helps them.

But is this a problem with objectives per se, or - as I believe to be the case - a problem with the volume of objectives, and the frankly gross errors that draughtsmen and women all too often make in drafting objectives?

Ultimately the simple truth is that What You Measure Is What You Get (as we proudly shout on our website).  The moon landings just wouldn't have happened if Kennedy hadn't made that speech in '61 (now there's a SMART objective if ever I saw one - "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth'). So objectives and targets, at least in my mind, are a sine qua non of both effective leadership and management.  Flawless no, extremely helpful yes. Just like a map won't guarantee you'll arrive safe and sound at your destination, it makes it much, much more likely.

But if What You Measure Is What You Get, then as creators of objectives, we have a far higher degree of responsibility than most people recognise. Because of course if you are measuring every single thing you can lay your hands on (my volume point from earlier), you're going to get bureaucracy by the bucket-load.  Ask any civil servant.  And if you're not getting the drafting right (my errors point from earlier), you're not going to get the right outcomes. Instead, you'll get a lot of output, a lot of activity and not much productivity. Garbage in, garbage out, as our friends in IT eloquently put it.

So the idea that objectives are yesterday's news is attractive in its neatness - ie. let's just scrap objectives. The problem is, it won't work. We all need guidance and parameters, and objectives are probably the best (although by no means perfect) method of achieving this.

The key is twofold:-

i) keep objectives to a minimum

ii) keep objectives SMART (anyone who'd like to talk through the advantages and disadvantages of the SMART mindset and acronym is more than welcome to post, as I think that's worthy of separate discussion)

Finally, don't forget the power of objectives. Without Kennedy's speech (read: objective), we wouldn't know who Neil Armstrong is.

Nick