By Ken Rosen
Let’s be clear—every strategic planning meeting starts with a joke about the meaning of Strategies vs. Goals vs. Objectives so attendees can signal they’re so senior they’ve been through the process endless times. On the optimistic side, it also signals attendees don’t want to spend time talking about definitions. To avoid that, we’re going to talk today about grapefruit, oranges, and limes. Why? Because these are the fruit critical to your organization’s growth.

Grapefruit are your longest term goals, er, I mean fruit: for us that means looking out 10, even 20 years and asking the big guiding-light questions: Why does the world need you? What is the purpose for your organization’s existence? At Performance Works, for example, our Grapefruit is: Solve problems that matter for interesting people for as long as our team wants to contribute to society. You avoid defining this fruit at your own peril. Helped by your citrus peeler, which lets your get to all your juicy fruit (that’s for another post), your grapefruit helps you make decisions large and small. It defines which oranges and limes to pick. Most important, it helps your employees and colleagues make better decisions every day.

So what about oranges?

Oranges are like grapefruit, but smaller. At the risk of squeezing the metaphor further, they are sweeter because they are more concrete. They define what you will accomplish in the next 24-48 months. To borrow a metaphor, if you’re climbing Mount Everest, you climb it one peak at a time. You climb these smaller peaks with the same single-minded intention, but Oranges give you a specific, well crafted path. For the record, our Orange at Performance Works is: Build a client and project list over the next 24 months so attractive it seduces our favorite consultants to crave working with us.

Ah, finally, the Limes.

Limes are small and tart to the point of feeling painful, but required for so many perfect beverages. They are tart because they define the hard work you have to do now. Right now. This year…this quarter. Skip or even delay a lime and your entire fruit bowl rots.

So we’re done with the fruit, but these ingredients don’t come together by themselves. You need to know how you’ll accomplish your Limes. So you need a Recipe—your specific approach to filling your entire fruit bowl.

To be clear, the scoreboard now has three fruit of varying timeframes and one recipe…you might describe these as three “whats” and one “how.”

If you don’t feel right talking about fruit and a recipe, pick your own words. At Performance Works, our words are, in order, Purpose, Mission, Objectives…and Strategies. Perhaps you’d prefer using dog breeds or Greek islands. No matter what, you need these four. Oh yes, and you also need the citrus peeler, but as we already know—that’s another post.

Takeaways:

  • Using your preferred terms, ensure your Strategic Plan includes a Purpose (20+ year reason for existing), a Mission (2-4 year measurable goal to guide priorities), current Objectives (1-4 quarter measurable goals)…and clear Strategies to achieve Objectives.

Before you click away, our thanks to Prof’s Jim Collins and Bill Lazier at Stanford (http://amzn.to/c7aD2D) for their work inspiring our views on this.