Begin With the End In Mind

At a recent Board of Directors meeting that I attended, the CEO wanted the Board to help him make a key decision about the company’s future. Sasha, the founder and CEO, already had gotten his young company off to a fast start – faster even than he had projected in his business plan. But he saw an opportunity to transform the company into an Internet business and dramatically increase its value.

“Should we continue to run the original plan, the one the shareholders invested in? Or should we adopt a riskier, higher potential payoff strategy?” Sasha wanted to know. It didn’t take the Board very long to get into an intense discussion, debating the merits of the Internet model vs. the original business model.

I got sucked right into the debate. It finally dawned on me that we were about to make a key decision in an absolute vacuum. I asked, “How can we decide which strategy to adopt without defining what our goals are for this company?” That stopped the discussion dead. Everyone realized that we were well down the path toward making an important decision without clearly understanding the results we were trying to achieve.

Unfortunately, far too many decisions get made this way. In business, government, education – everywhere, every day, people make poor decisions because they fail to stop and ask what success looks like. To make an intelligent decision, everyone involved in making that decision must share the same definition of success.

We spent much of the rest of the meeting discussing where we hoped the company would be in two or three years. Once we felt we had defined goals that would satisfy all the stakeholders in the business, we were able to get back to the original question and begin the process of deciding what strategy we should adapt to reach those goals.

If you examine you own decision making process, you will probably find that too often you make decisions based on the immediate issues at hand. Next time you are faced with an important decision, in your business or in your personal life, ask yourself, “What are my goals? What’s the best way to reach those goals? What do these answers tell me about the decision I’m facing?”

Steven Covey in his “7 Habits” book popularized the phrase, “Begin with the end in mind.” That’s the best piece of decision making advice I’ve ever heard. Make it your mantra and you’ll be making better decisions, feeling better about those decisions and worrying less about the end results.

© 2008 Russell S. Holdstein All rights reserved.