It is with some irony that I learnt that the word “goal” comes from Old French, something for their current failing national football team to reflect on.

In business, the word “goal” is used in its original form – a limit or boundary to seek out.

No – it is not just the World Cup bug that made me link the two concepts. This week, I was trying to explain to a young company the importance of setting targets and planning towards them. Otherwise, you tend to drift, lose focus, procrastinate. In fact, you often end up being totally busy, doing nothing commercially worthwhile.

 “How to set business goals” is a well-worn phrase on google. Amazingly, most managers do not set them, and even fewer are reported to differentiate between short and long term targets.

I was speaking to a company that has been asked to make cutbacks by HQ. They have gone over budget and now sales are down. Salaried positions will have to be sacrificed to ensure that profit margins are protected. All very politically and financially correct.

Correct, until somebody then asked how they were going to increase sales. There were no resources available to invest in this seemingly irrelevant activity. 5 minutes of extra checking revealed that competitors are enjoying a boom. Big ouch!

A simple analysis revealed that HQ had been insisting that the unit toe the line as imposed from the top. As everybody ran around to please the “senders of e-mail”, all sides of the party forgot why they were in business; to sell in order to make a profit. Years of continued success have been converted in to….an empty hole with no end in sight.

In both my case studies, a large outfit and a small set up, the planning boards are coming out very quickly. The first team are looking closely at where they want their new firm to be by the end of year one. The second group is taking a near and far term approach, once HQ can realise that there is more to life than a piece of paper with numbers.