Example Of Essay On Goal Setting And Attainment

“The Goal” is a book which explains among others, managerial skills. It talks about using these skills to achieve greater efficiency and higher productivity in a rather lucid and simple manner. The protagonist in the book is called Mr. Rogo who struggles to turn a company which has been making losses to a company which is profitable. However, Rogo also has familial problems which he must deal with. The authors explain the drudgeries associated with an engineer who is working in a manufacturing company. The authors explain several management skills which they say must be present in a professional’s life. The ideas expressed in the book must be conceptualized and understood so as to make them practicable.
Unico is a loss making company. Alex is the Plant Manager. The plant is inefficient and his boss (Bill Peach) is always on his back. In addition to the already stressful work life, his wife is also mad at him because he does not give her attention. He is given three months to turn the company around. With the pressure mounting up, Alex is at a loss of what to do. Luck smiles at his door step and he meets his favorite professor (Jonah) who assures him that he is not heading a plant with inefficient people, but one with an inefficient system. Jonah tells Mr. Rogo that the goal of any organization is to make money. And everything done henceforth must be oriented towards money.
Jonah explains to Rogo that the process of goal attainment starts with first identifying that goal. And any organization or business has one goal towards which they must strive. That goal is making money (making profit). Therefore, he must first know about variability and constraints. Variability, he is told, is what makes his plant not to put resources to full use. Constraints on the other hand make the plant not to have up to capacity productivity.
When Alex goes to a camp with his son, he learns a lesson which he later uses to address his problem. After setting the goal (profit making), he identifies the bottlenecks in the line of manufacturing. These bottlenecks are the cause of hindrance to growth. Constraints are also highlighted upon. Jonah advises Rogo to reduce operational costs and increase output. In this process, inventory also becomes an important factor. He advised Alex to reduce inventory so that operational costs could be manageable. Mr. Jonah talks to Alex about return of investment, cash flow and net profits in their importance to organizational growth.
In the process of goal setting, the author, through his protagonist, reveals that there are two specific phenomena which cause the effect of increase in savings. These are statistical fluctuations and dependent variables. Statistical fluctuations are a result of predictive information which cannot be precisely determined. Dependent variables on the other hand are events which take place before the beginning of another. In relation to savings in the process of attainment of those goals, statistical fluctuations are a great influence to the prediction of demand estimates, error percentages and even in the measure of productivity. Alex, in his camp with his son, learns that there are resources which must have capacity more than others. This is especially towards the end of the operating sequence. He also learns that operational expenses are mainly measured by the cost of energy. Energy, he admits, must be conserved. In addition, he notices that inventory is normally equal to the length between the backdoor and the leader. This must be minimized. Finally, he learns that the final throughput (output) is measurable according to the last and slowest operation in the sequence. In order to test his theories, he does what he calls a production capacity test. Here, the team focuses on the capacity of production. It also focuses on turning bottlenecks into non-bottlenecks. He observes that bottleneck is actually not operational costs, but hidden potential. Alex uses these truths to turn the company around. He eventually succeeds.
In his book, “Success Always Starts with Failure”, Tim Harford says that success is a consequence of us fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right the first time. In order to prove this, the author highlights various examples with which he drives hi point home. First, he states that there is a wrong way to react when faced by a problem. A person should forget his or her ego, deny it or do what he says is hedonistic editing. Hedonistic editing happens when downplays his or her situation. Second, he gives a recipe for successful adaptation. He says that when a person has an idea, he or she should not wait, wondering whether the idea is worth working on or not. He goes ahead to outline three principles for failing productively. While on this point, he advises that one must cast learn to cast his or her net wider in order to catch more fish. Therefore, ideas should be many. These first two points resonate well with actual practice. Attitude is a great recipe for success. If a person changes his or her attitude about failure, then success is just around the corner. One missed step does not mean that the journey comes to an end.
The next advice that Tim gives is one about emotions. He warns his readers, who want to learn to completely get rid of emotions and remove them from equation. He says that one must forget whether he or she is ahead or behind but instead focus on continuing from where they are. He also talks about attachment. He advises that people should not get too attached to their plans. Here, he gives the words of Von Moltke significance. Von Moltke once said that no plan ever survived the first contact with the enemy. He adds that no plan is ever wrong. What makes a plan wrong or right is the implementation thereof. He gives the danger of a plan as being seductively persuasive of people into thinking that failure is impossible whilst adaptation unnecessary. He gives the example of the titanic to drive this home.