Page 82 - Hard Goals

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excited, passionate, and devoted because they’ve drawn a pic-
ture underlying those numbers that’s immediately accessible to
the mind of every employee, customer, and investor. Numbers
are nice and easy measuring sticks to see how much progress
you’ve made toward achieving the goal in your picture. But
they’re means to an end, not the end itself. It’s the goal in your
picture that really represents your end.
What’s the goal of Apple’s iPod? As Steve Jobs said when it
launched, it’s like having “1,000 songs in your pocket.” You’ll
notice that Apple used a number, but it was a concrete number.
(I can easily picture 1,000 songs, on CDs, fl oating in air and
then shrinking into my iPod, can’t you?) And then, of course,
there’s the MacBook Air, otherwise known as “The world’s
thinnest notebook.” Sounds slim, but still a pretty solid concept
to me. Ba-dumm-bumm.
Likewise when Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page
walked into venture capital fi rm Sequoia Capital to get funding
for their start-up search engine company. They said the goal of
Google was to “provide access to the world’s information in one
7
click.” Or consider how Starbucks founder Howard Schultz
described the goal of his company: “Starbucks creates a third
place between work and home.” In the best companies, you’ll
fi nd that their goals sound a lot like their marketing, which
sounds a lot like their vision. Employees, customers, investors,
and the press can all vividly picture the company’s goals. In a
phrase, they have “message consistency.”
In each one of the above examples I can concretely picture
the proposed goal. I can see (and hear) someone clicking a mouse
for Google. I can imagine what that “third place” looks like for
Starbucks right down to the pervading coffee-bean smell and
how happy people’s faces will look once they realize they have