The idea behind MBO is extremely simple: If you don't know where you're going, you will not get there. Or, as an old Indian saying puts it, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.”

A successful MBO system needs only to answer two questions:

  1. Where do I want to go? (The answer provides the objective.)
  2. How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? (The answer gives us milestones, or key results.)

Forcing ourselves to concentrate on the decisions needed to fix today's problem is like scurrying after our car has already run out of gas.

Clearly we should have filled up earlier. To avoid such a fate, remember that as you plan you must answer the question: What do I have to do today to solve-or better, avoid-tomorrow's problem?

Finally, remember that by saying “yes"-to projects, a course of action, or whatever-you are implicitly saying 'no" to something else. Each time you make a commitment, you forfeit your chance to commit to something else. This, of course, is an inevitable, inescapable consequence of allocating any finite resource. People who plan have to have the guts, honesty, and discipline to drop projects as well as to initiate them, to shake their heads “no" as well as to smile "yes."

"Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization." - Alfred Sloan

When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can't do it or won't do it; he is either not capable or not motivated. To determine which, we can employ a simple mental test: if the person's life depended on doing the work, could he do it? If the answer is yes, that person is not motivated; if the answer is no, he is not capable.

The physiological, safety/security, and social needs all can motivate us to show up for work, but other needsesteem and self-actualization-make us perform once we are there.

"what I can be, I must be."

"what I can be, I must be." The title of a movie about athletes, Personal Best, captures what selfactualization means: the need to achieve one's utter personal best in a chosen field of endeavor. Once someone's source of motivation is self-actualization, his drive to perform has no limit. Thus, its most important characteristic is that unlike other sources of motivation, which extinguish themselves after the needs are fulfilled, selfactualization continues to motivate people to ever higher levels of performance.

Thus, our role as managers is, first, to train the individuals (to move them along the horizontal axis shown in the illustration on page 158), and, second, to bring them to the point where self-actualization motivates them, because once there, their motivation will be self-sustaining and limitless.

a manager's most important responsibility is to elicit top performance from his subordinates