Goals and Objectives

Didja ever run into corporate America’s penchant for setting goals and objectives on a regular basis. They were to be SMART goals. SMART is an acronym (Annoyingly Cryptic References Or Names You Make) standing for Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant and Timely. Every time I got traded to a new manager I had to go through this nonsense.

I know that some people find usefulness in this goal setting exercise. I find doing so to be terribly limiting. I have an insatiable wondering that is constantly outside the boundaries of some set of predefined goals or objectives. Besides, the minute they are set every manager I ever had checked my name off the list and neither of us ever looked at them again. When I had a manager that would dredge them up later, I always made sure that my hallowed list of objectives either just listed what I was already doing or listed things I had done that I hadn’t mentioned to my manager so that they didn’t affect me.

I never hid my feelings about them to any manager, telling each that the whole exercise was a load of CRAP (Completely Ridiculous And Problematic). I’d then point out that unless I was specifically given the wherewithal to meet those objectives I was being set up for failure. I never found anyone who could definitively tell me how limiting my options to a predefined list benefited me or them. BTW, my way resulted in the development of productivity tools that were used across EDS when I got tired of repetitively doing the same things all the time. Had I been tied to a finite set of objectives, the productivity tools would not have been developed and shared.

‘Course maybe this resistance to structured crap was probably partially why I got traded to other managers so often. LOL