Outcomes

The other day I was reading a book by Peter Drucker. He made a point about ‘efforts’ v/s ‘outcomes’. ‘Efforts’ are only thing that exist within an organization. On other hand, 'outcomes' lie outside organization.  Outcomes matter and we need to hold people accountable for outcomes.

 

Ensuring focus on ‘outcomes’ is easier said than done. Every outcome can be seen as a mean to some other outcome/end. So how do you decide a particular 'outcome' is actually an outcome and not just a mean?

 

I think you can’t decide this post facto. The only way to ensure that correct outcomes are being targeted and met is through ‘goal setting’ rout – ensuring goal setting focuses on outcomes and performance progress is assessed against agreed upon outcomes.

 

Similarly, there needs to be a very definite linkage between outcome achievement and reward allocation.

 

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Sourav