Cat Got Your Goals?

When somewhere gets you nowhere

I’m not sure he meant to be giving business advice when Lewis Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, but this exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat is instructive nonetheless.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—“ said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

The cat has a point. The most important thing about getting where you want to be is knowing where you want to be. Without that, tactics are trivia.

In business, knowing where you are going is achieved by setting quality goals every quarter and laying out the path to achieving them. But how do you …