Goal Setting Notes from Bing Gordon

Bing Gordon presented at Goal Summit on Nov 4, 2015. Taking about Goals, Operational Excellence, Aligning People Across Goals, and Strategy vs Execution. Notes taken by my colleague Mark Kennedy and shared in an internal Museum Hack chat room that I am re-publishing here.

“Job of a manager: shovel compliments/praise to employees and take bags of money back in return.”

Raw Notes

• We need to write plans down. Have them posted everywhere for all to see. What are the key goals, how are we measuring ourselves for them.
• But… You are going to laugh at yourself looking at old plans. It’s kind of like smoking pot & writing down your ideas then reading them in the morning.  
• Persistence, pivot, & speed matter. Goals aren’t permanent.
• Execution drives strategy, not vice versa.
• You can be high performing achieving half of your goals, as long as you pick the right half.
• Goal setting — meritocracy is important, hardest thing to do as a manager/teacher is to set appropriate performance metrics.
• Right way is to set for employees so they can measure for themselves & you can ask how they did, your opinion doesn’t matter if you can see the data.

Related video

More notes: Amazon and Goal Setting

• Amazon at scale is the best example of meritocracy.
• Employees are measured on input, not on output. Jeff Bezos doesn’t hold anyone responsible for revenue.
• You control: speed of delivery, accuracy of delivery, pricing — Only measuring people on what they put in.

Operational Excellence

• Most companies, when you talk to top execs, what’s your job, they can’t answer.
• Most people in good companies know what they’d get fired for & know what their goal is
• Very few people know what they’d get promoted for.

Giving Feedback

• We’re all addicted to feedback. It sucks when it’s just from a spreadsheet or iPhone, instead of a person.
• Tends to ask before giving feedback: on a scale of 1-10, how open are you to feedback right now?

Hiring and The Team

• Raise the hiring bar, cultural alignment is SUPER important.
• 2nd time CEOs obsess over it, only hiring the 1-5% best people that fit the culture, etc.

“All entrepreneurs are in a race against time, we need to divide & conquer.”

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