Purposeful Mission, Profitable Opportunities

In his book, Master Opportunity and Make it Big, Richard M Rothman says, “The success of your career, your business, or any other important aspect of your life, is enormously influenced by the opportunities you choose to pursue. In fact, these decisions are among the most important you will ever make in your life. In choosing these, you choose your fate.” Enabling innovation and growth in an organization comes from choosing the right, lucrative opportunities that are compatible with its vision and mission.

- Richard M Rothman

The fundamental role of a leader is to set a firm direction for the team to follow. As a business leader, you are expected to steer your ship toward opportunities that can provide many years of sustained, profitable growth.

Do you often feel that your business has lost its way? Has it consistently missed opportunities that have been captured by others?

Unless you know in which direction you want to go, virtually any course of action will get you lost. Whether you define it as a mission, a vision, or a goal, the direction you set for your team is always crucial to your success.

These days most companies have prepared a written mission and vision statement. Unfortunately, these statements tend to be corporate versions of the Ten Commandments, ie we are innovative, ethical, a meritocracy, customer-centric, etc.

Although this type of mission and vision statement may serve as an excellent guide to appropriate corporate and employee behavior, it rarely helps to set us on a firm course to harvesting the best opportunities.

financial goals can make you poorer

As the alternative to using their mission statement, most leaders set financial goals. In the past five years, I have interviewed the managing directors of several hundred Indian companies of all sizes in dozens of sectors. Over 99 percent have described their missions to me in financial terms, such as: “We would like to double sales in the next three years.”

In general, these leaders have consistently failed to meet these lofty goals. Why?

Financial goals can be useful at a tactical level, for example, setting targets for individual salespeople. However, at a strategic level, they are ineffective. Why? Because financial goals do not, in any way, help the leader or his team to find, evaluate and choose the opportunities that can provide sustained, profitable growth.