Business goals 101

by Jon Rappoport

May 16, 2016

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)

This is a brief version of a much larger exploration of business operations and objectives.

With some clients in my consulting practice, I find this focus is paramount.

First of all, what is a particular business trying to do? What is its basic purpose? That answer can only be supplied by the person who heads up the company. He is the beginning and end of that vision.

And then, when the goal is clear, how is it going to be achieved?

This latter question often leads to mistakes, the most prominent of which is over-organization or badly designed organization.

Organization should be a function of the primary purpose, not a stand-alone structure that mimics other familiar patterns.

What do you need to do, in order to get where you want to go? And who needs to do it?

Think of organization as a collection of project teams. Each team has a leader, and each leader works to attain a “sub-goal.” If all the teams succeed, the major goal is achieved. That’s the plot, the story-line, the best prediction, the best estimate.

These teams are at the heart of a business operation.

Realizing that, the head of the business may see he has to radically reorganize his company. His present pattern is all wrong. It’s traditional, bulky, redundant, wasteful, annoying, thoughtless, and grossly distracting.

In fact, this can get so bad the organization becomes a maze. People are lost in it. Functions circle around and come back to their starting points.

At the extreme, you would see what I saw, many years ago, when I was called in to assess a small start-up. A dozen people were sitting at desks in a large room. They all had titles. They sat there and looked at paper. They basically pushed paper from one desk to another. Around and around it went. That’s all that was going on. Of course, no one would admit it—least of all the CEO. He was quite proud of having designed these titles and jobs to achieve his primary objective. And theoretically, he talked a good game. But really, the set-up was a total failure. There weren’t any project leaders or teams. No one was actually projecting the sale of anything. It was a giant bubble.

Many businesses are structured so their functions mesh with each other—but the primary goal is left out in the cold. Too much focus turns to the implementation of non-productive Pattern.

I have written before about the obsession for systems. You could liken it to the building of a house. The owner is fixated on installing all the proper functions, and in the end what he has is a bunch of adjacent spaces that really have nothing to do with the house he wanted in the first place. His primary vision is gone and buried.

I once worked with a CEO client who was drowning in his own company. He couldn’t see his way in or out. I told him we were going to have a series of conversations during which he would re-build, as it were, his business from scratch. From the ground up. From nothing. Starting with his primary goal and vision.

Eventually, in our dialogue, he reconstructed, in a new way, what his company would have to do, in order to reach the goal. What his company would look like, what projects it would undertake, who would undertake them—and all this was based on action, not mindless organization.

He was able to dump his obsession for systems. He was able to look at his future without peering through an arbitrary lens of over-organization. He was able to shake off years of empty stagnation.

Most profoundly, he was able to scrape away the accumulated veneer of shallow cynicism, in which he’d coated his own dreams.

And when he did that, his imagination came back to him. He could live with new energy.

He could feel the future he was, in fact, inventing.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.