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WHAT’S YOUR DESTINATION?

Understand Your Objectives

Energy and motivation are wonderful to behold. But without a direction, they can have you spinning in circles and wondering why you aren’t accomplishing what you set out to do. A three-word question helps you define your objectives and is the best way to begin any task. What and why? That is, what do you want to accomplish and why are you doing it? The answer to the question clarifies the reason you are undertaking a task and constitutes the first step in preparation.

Lest you think that taking the time to clearly define your objectives slows you down, my experience is that it is an essential step in pushing performance from acceptable to exceptional. You are one of thousands of talented and dedicated people in your field. Better performance and greater satisfaction require harnessing motivation with a clear understanding of your objectives. Definition is the differentiator.

Say you catch the fever to climb Mt. Everest, as has been the case with an increasing number of mountaineers. Implicit is the goal to make it to the top. But unless you clearly spell out the objective to include coming down safely, your ultimate strategy for a safe return may fail as it has for an increasing number of climbers.

Say you get a big promotion, and it is your assignment to fill your previous position. The two candidates are two of your closest friends in your company. Rather than offend either, you come up with a compromise that splits the job into two positions. Your boss approves it. A year later, you realize clarity and accountability demand a single person in one position. Your shared leadership plan results in their passing the buck to each other; they argue over who should make decisions; their staff gets confused. Intuition and impulsiveness caused you to make a decision without clearly understanding your objective of having accountability and responsibility in the position. Had you fully defined your objective, you would have found another way to preserve the friendships as well as the integrity of the position.

Intuition and its dangerous relative, impulsiveness, often convince you that it is okay to skip this preparation principle. It may often be the case that you undertake a task without fully defining your objectives; that is, you rush right in without pausing to understand why you are doing something and where you want it to take you or your project. And consequently, since the preparation principles are linked sequentially, you undermine the added value of each subsequent principle, and the preparation process falls short.

Defining your objectives is the first domino that tips over the others on the path toward proper preparation.

Can you imagine being told to slow down in business or in life to succeed? I still sometimes struggle to ignore those cultural voices telling us that we should follow our gut and trust our instinct. Preparation involves perpetual humility.

Call it purpose-driven work: the best work is done with a clearheaded understanding of its purpose. Don’t do it just because your boss said to do it. Don’t do it just because your gut tells you it is the thing to do.

In 1986, baseball was struggling with a drug crisis. I discussed the problem regularly with some of my clients. Our gut told us to reach out to the fans through the press and tell them my clients were clean. Instead, we slowed down and used clearly defined objectives to build a program that might have served the game as an example over twenty years later.

COMING CLEAN ABOUT DRUGS

Today’s baseball fans have lived in trying times. The steroid plague and the failure to implement an effective testing policy gave the game a reputation of shadows and slipperiness. What was real and what was chemical? Who was telling the truth and who was fibbing? What hits come from talent and preparation and what home runs come from injections?

Baseball fans may also recall a drug plague in the early and mid-1980s. Then the drug was cocaine, an outgrowth, some said, of rampant amphetamine use in the game. Drug busts of players on the Kansas City Royals and the Pittsburgh Pirates, among others, alarmed fans to the point of revolt. The game was jeopardizing its kid-friendly reputation, and fans were irate.

In 1986, I represented many of the players on the major-league roster of the Baltimore Orioles. Most of them were very solid citizens who cared deeply about the integrity of their profession. They wanted to speak out against drugs but not betray teammates or the camaraderie of their fellow players.

Both of these objectives struck me as honorable, albeit sometimes contradictory. And so I sat down with groups of my players and probed their objectives and encouraged them to do the same. We collectively realized that this was a group that had really dedicated themselves to being citizens of their community. And the best way to demonstrate their values to their fans would not be through the press but through some sort of tangible proof.

So we developed this objective: “In order to demonstrate to our city that this problem is isolated and not affecting this team, we will develop and participate voluntarily in a drug-testing program for the entire season.” All but a handful of players on the team and all of the management agreed to submit to a yearlong drug-testing program administered by Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. It would be rigid and scientific and random.

At the end of the year, the bond between the fans of Baltimore and the Orioles players was stronger than ever. A by-product was a statement made to the Players Association and Major League Baseball that the will for grassroots change among players existed. A clear understanding of objectives by a unique group of young men led to an exemplary result.

The point is that reflection hones intuition. Your initial impulse may point you in the right direction, but the key is to clarify, refine, or even re-define your objectives.

Next in this chapter I profile three people who understand their objectives: entrepreneur and Forbes 400 member Steve Bisciotti, Dr. Henry Taylor of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and banker Michelle Shepherd. As a businessman, Steve focuses on aligning his objectives with his specific talents better than anyone I have met. Henry slows down and clarifies his objectives despite the urgency and complexity of international health crises. And Michelle uses the clarity achieved with the repetition of objectives to help a large and disparate team work together toward a common goal.

ALIGNING YOUR OBJECTIVES WITH YOUR TALENTS

          Steve Bisciotti

Steve Bisciotti, with his gruff voice and gregarious manner, strikes you more as a Pro Bowl football player than a young NFL owner. And when he starts to speak about his career, he has the eyes of a linebacker—darting, intense, and focused on the objectives.

Steve hones his objectives to fit his strengths. He has a keen self-awareness that helps him clearly define and stay dedicated to his targets. Nothing shows this more than the way Steve set his primary objective to build a great company based on his peerless sales abilities. Another objective—providing financial security for his family after losing his father at an early age—provided the motivation for fulfilling the first. Steve set his eyes on these two clear objectives and never blinked. You get the sense that he wakes up every morning and recounts each objective—one, two, three, four—before he begins his day.

Steve founded Allegis Group, a technical services and recruiting company, when he was twenty-three years old and had just $3,500 in the bank. He had been fired from his first job and was living with two friends who were bartenders in a town house in Annapolis, Maryland; Steve asked them if he could convert their basement into his headquarters. One of the bartenders became his first employee, his cousin became his partner and business manager, and Steve used his sales skills to grow a multibillion-dollar company in the course of a decade. Today he owns the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens.

When he was eight years old, Steve lost his father to leukemia. You ask him to talk about his laserlike focus on objectives and this is the first thing he brings up.

“From the day my dad died, my mother was constantly talking to us about the real reason we were doing things, the real objective of any activity,” Steve said. “It was like suddenly you realized the urgency of everything, the need to have a clear objective.”

So Steve realized his first objective in life and business even before he was a teenager: to be able to leave his family on solid financial footing were he to die at age thirty-five like his father.

That is a pretty intense objective. I can relate to it because my father died when I was sixteen. I admired him the way Steve admired his father. Their early deaths, Steve says, “fix them in some sort of stasis—they are always admirable and always perfect in our image of them.”

Our objectives can come from uncanny, almost biological sources. They can even come from tragedy.

Steve clearly links not only his professional and financial success, but also his value system, to the loss of his father and his mother’s rallying of the family.

“My only objective in the early days was to be rich enough when I died at thirty-five that my wife and kids wouldn’t have to work,” Steve said. “It was that simple.”

But Steve’s mother helped him establish another critical objective that he exercises to this day: seek and value character over competence. Steve struggled in school. He had a hard time with memorization and fought to pay better attention in class.

“There were no redeeming qualities to education in my book,” Steve said. “I don’t like saying that now as a parent. But then I knew what I was good at and what my mother wanted me to be good at.”

So when he would return home from school with poor grades, his mother would first confirm that he had put forth his best effort. And then she would evaluate him on things like his manners, character, and determination as if she were grading a homework assignment. And she would encourage him to be a salesman.

“She loved business accomplishment almost as much as she loved personal ethics and morality,” Steve said. “So even though I failed at school she made me proud to achieve in things like good manners, character, and integrity. And she knew early on that I was going to be a salesman. She saw it in me and brought that talent out of me when I was struggling with more orthodox measures of talent like school.”

So the professional objective—to be a great salesman—became a fundamental part of Steve’s life as a teenager. The decision to sell services and not products came when he had to select a job from the three offers he got upon graduation from Salisbury State College.

“Selling Monroe computers, selling medical supplies, or working in the temp industry selling services,” Steve said. “The guy who hired me changed my life. He said that if you take a job selling products you can always be outdone no matter how hard you work. Somebody may simply want the IBM instead of the Monroe. In the services industry you can’t be outdone by a product. So my objective to become a great salesman became even clearer.”

Steve was essentially a one-man band when he soon set off on his own to form Allegis. He was trying to outwork his competitors by phoning engineers from 7 A.M. to 10 P.M., covering both East and West Coast workdays when his East Coast competitors went home at 6 P.M. After hours and in between calls and trips, he did his own accounting, met with his attorney, and paid bills. He did it all well, but felt the back office business obligations distracted him from the objective of being the very best salesman he could be.

“I knew I was a born salesman—I instinctively knew how to make people want to give me business,” Steve said. “But I was struggling to pull it all together. I was getting depressed. So I called a guy from my neighborhood who was a mentor to ask how to pull the business together.”

Heeding the advice, Steve brought in his cousin, a CPA, as a major shareholder and rededicated himself exclusively to sales. And then Allegis really took off.

And that rapid success allowed Steve to realize another objective—being in the sports business—that he had always harbored but never allowed himself to focus on because of his commitment to the primary ones of supporting his family and being an unrivaled salesman. Steve had always loved sports, and for many years he dreamed of running a team.

So when the opportunity arose to purchase the Baltimore Ravens NFL franchise, Steve set a very specific, twofold objective. First, it was common knowledge that Art Modell, then the Ravens’ owner, was struggling financially and essentially had to sell the team to leave his own family on solid financial footing. So Steve wanted the transaction to respect Art’s legacy to the NFL. Second, Steve realized that this transaction would take him outside of the one business he knew he had mastered—sales. And he knew he had decided early on in his life to eliminate distractions and maintain his focus on his area of expertise. So he set an objective that became the premise for the transaction: he wanted to stage his purchase of the team in a way that allowed Art Modell to transition out of majority ownership and allowed Steve to transition into a new field of business.

With the help of some talented attorneys and accountants, Steve and Art staged a four-year transition in ownership in which Steve would first become a minority owner and then eventually a majority owner and leave Art a very small share in the franchise.

“To do business the way my mother insisted I do business, I had to honor Art in that way,” Steve said. “At the same time I had a lot to learn and also had the objective of slowly making a positive impression on the community. The transition phase was self-serving in a way, but also the best combination for both Art and me. It was a win-win.”

The structure was very innovative in the business of professional sports. Usually a wealthy purchaser of a franchise can’t wait to take control and revel in the acclaim and excitement of professional sports. But Steve set the distinct objective of learning the business and supporting Art.

In the meantime, he also used the interregnum to evaluate the Ravens’ business and coaching staff to determine whom he would retain or replace.

Disdainful of distraction, Steve devotes himself to ownership with the same singularity of purpose with which he worked the telephone for fifteen hours a day as a salesman in the basement of a bachelor’s town house.

Steve Bisciotti woke up at age twenty-three and went to work like he might die at thirty-five. He kept his linebacker eyes on his objectives and realized them by the age his father was when he passed away. Steve kept his objectives to a handful, tailored them to his strengths, and pursued them relentlessly.

THE OBJECTIVE IS GLOBAL PREPARATION

          Dr. Henry Taylor

If you have not died from avian flu by now, you might want to find a way to thank Dr. Henry Taylor and his colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School’s Center for Public Health Preparedness.

The name of the center says it all—Preparedness.

The preparation objective at the Center is simple: control or even eliminate public health epidemics around the globe. Henry and his colleagues sharpen this objective by breaking it down into two components: the transformation of social structures so some struggling communities can better tend to their own health, and the analysis of the stages of disease and epidemics in order to precisely time research expenditures, political lobbying, and public intervention.

Henry illustrates how you set clear objectives by slowing down and cutting through the clutter and complexity of a challenge. His field is public health, but the manner in which he clarifies his objectives is applicable in any professional or business pursuit.

This Hopkins school, in whose growth Henry’s father played an instrumental role, houses some of the most bustling, constant preparers you will ever meet. Imagine the trading floor of a stock exchange, but here the professors and students and community activists and government leaders are exchanging ideas about epidemics and disease. You hear numerous languages, see several shades of skin, and feel a satisfying “globalness” to which the United Nations can only aspire.

These constant preparers thrive on two paradoxes: success never comes, and results are achieved only when something doesn’t happen.

Success never comes because bacteria and viruses are constantly evolving as a part of the global biological system of which we form a mere part.

And these preparers do not know when to celebrate—in fact, they never can completely celebrate a result—because there is no finite moment when they know that the disease or epidemic has been defeated or that a new one is not racing around the corner.

In public health, preparation of the many depends upon the mostly invisible preparation by the few, and some of those few are scurrying through the halls of the Center for Public Health Preparedness. Not aware of it, we are all in the hands of these health professionals dedicated to preparing us for the next epidemic. Our obliviousness is not so much a basic right as a product of the work and constant preparation of these public health professionals.

Henry carries a little bottle of alcohol-based hand disinfectant in his backpack; books with titles like The Sources and Modes of Infection and The Swine Flu Affair line the bookshelf of his spartan office; he analyzes the spread of germs at the cafeteria counter for you as you line up to pay for your lunch. The reality of the bacterial and viral world—the risks and complexities of microbes—would probably overwhelm most of us with anxiety. But for Henry it is a never-ending source of intellectual excitement and social commitment.

Having clear objectives is essential to succeeding in this high-stakes mission.

“The critical issue, perhaps for the future of the human race, is grassroots community engagement in general and the empowerment of women in health care worldwide in particular,” Henry said. “Networking among women in terms of health is the key to wholesale change in health care and lifestyle. It is a fact that women and particularly mothers are the ones who drive and achieve lifestyle change. We are at the very early stages of instituting this change, but it is catching fire. By 2020 the community networking will be extensive.”

What can tempt public health professionals away from this networking objective? Henry believes it is the disease-of-the-month club mentality driven by politicians and celebrities, as well as a fixation with pharmaceuticals.

“Our approach is contaminated by the notion of magic bullets,” Dr. Taylor noted. “Take MRSA, or methicillin resistant staph infections. Interaction between humans and infections goes back to the beginning of time. But now, because we have overprescribed antibiotics for things like the flu for which they do not work, the bacteria have adapted and are defeating the pharmaceutical process.”

Like many of his colleagues, Henry is committed to the objective of seeking a more community-based approach that puts prevention first and uses antibiotic treatment as a complementary rather than a comprehensive treatment.

“In public health we are about creating change, not ending disease,” he said. “This entails preparation for change within a community. In this case the community is the hospital. What are their cleanliness procedures? Isolation strategies? Waste disposal procedures? Is their objective an MRSA-free situation? What is the cost/benefit analysis of preparation compared with increased medical costs caused by infection?”

He summons precedent to illustrate the second part of the Center’s preparedness objective, the breakdown of epidemics into stages or phases. In 1976, the federal government heeded the advice of a group of researchers who accurately believed that influenza moves in cycles but wrongly predicted an imminent cycle because of faulty analysis. The federal government appropriated $137 million to develop a vaccine that had a debilitating side effect, and waited for the assault. Nothing happened: the flu did not materialize.

In contrast, Dr. Taylor cites HIV as an example of a collective failure within the public health community to act quickly enough. In particular, political interference in public health strategy impeded proper preparation of a solution and the methodical education and preparation of the affected communities.

“Experts and officials were very late in setting a clear objective,” Henry said.

He went on to note: “You don’t want to be too early or too late because the political and fiscal authorities will remind you the next time and not fund a sufficient response. Dr. Charles Chapin, a godfather of public health, believed that you don’t go to politicians when an event is just starting, but rather when you are in crisis mode. You go when the outbreak is in full swing and make your pitch for investment at that time. It is a rather manipulative tenet, but a necessary one. It is the nature of our business, and Chapin revolutionized it in the early part of the twentieth century.”

The World Health Organization prescribes a six-phase pandemic assessment and reaction process. For each phase, the objectives are very different. The CDC now thinks of epidemics like hurricanes with categories of severity.

Henry believes that public health depends upon adhering to these methodical processes as the objectives of preparation.

This view leads him directly to the topic of the potential avian flu pandemic.

“Different animals get different versions of a disease, and the reason avian flu stalled in the 2006–07 winter is because it is hard for the viruses to jump into the human biological system,” Henry said. “But in time, a new human virus will develop. We know it will happen eventually from public health precedents. Our objective has to be to act on the best evidence without panicking. We are doing a fair job at that now, but not a perfect one.”

As another example of the poor use of phasing to inform strategy, Henry notes that the costly vaccines being developed in 2007 may not be adequate or sufficient by the time the avian flu virus fully translates to a new human virus.

“We set our objective of needing a vaccine, but some companies are producing it based on the best available sample of the virus, and that won’t be the best vaccine when the virus makes the full jump to humans,” he said. “At that time our objective will be more specific. While we can develop the factories and methods now, we should invest the most in vaccine development at phase 4 when the sample is superior and closer to what we will really face as a population.”

Instead, Henry would prefer the resources be devoted to community-based preparation like education of citizens and of medical personnel, creation of community-based task forces and health departments, and the construction of a network for public health communications.

“You anticipate a certain situation based on precedents and investigation, and your specific response will come out of that preparation,” Henry said. “The underlying objective is always the same—the maintenance and improvement of public health. The commitment to method is key. Rushing or overreacting based on alarm or political pressure undermines our preparation.”

The enormity of these challenges is matched by the complexity of the cellular world. Clear objectives offer Henry and his colleagues the best chance of tracking and controlling unwelcome visitations from the microbial world. Objectives in Henry’s high-stakes field are only potent when they are clearly established and diligently pursued.

REPEAT, REPEAT, REPEAT

          Michelle Shepherd

One of the critical parts of any manager’s job is getting people to collaborate and form an effective team. It is always a challenge, but especially so in a large company.

Michelle Shepherd, executive of the East Division of Bank of America, uses clear objectives as the way to meet that challenge. Her success shows that defining and repeating objectives makes all the difference in building a motivated and cohesive team.

Michelle has four very specific objectives that she is constantly stating and monitoring: (1) driving material increases in sales each fiscal year; (2) improving what she calls “customer delight” at each bank branch to a score of 9 or 10 on a scale of 10; (3) completely complying with banking regulations; and (4) constantly improving employee satisfaction.

The fulfillment of these four objectives consumes Michelle. They are the mental outline she uses to structure her day. Everyone, from her leadership team to tellers at far-flung Bank of America branches, knows what they are. The clarity of her commitment to these objectives is obvious and contagious. They are her team’s refrain, and the growth of her East Division is a reflection of the clarity with which Michelle defines them.

Michelle came up through the ranks at credit card giant MBNA before it was bought by Bank of America to gain access to MBNA’s vast and lucrative credit card business. Michelle had been instrumental in MBNA’s innovation and success with its card sponsorship program. An added benefit of the acquisition was MBNA’s entrepreneurial and innovative culture.

“One of my primary means of achieving our four objectives is bringing a more entrepreneurial approach to the way we see things and do things,” Michelle said. “Banking is not a business you usually associate with entrepreneurship but, from the way we deal with customers and innovations at the branch level, there is a huge role for entrepreneurship.”

Entrepreneurs are intensely devoted to their objectives because the stakes are so high for them. Michelle’s encouragement of an entrepreneurial attitude at a large bank helps instill the common drive to achieve her four objectives. The repetition of these four clear goals helps the people in a large organization develop a common mission. The clarity and simplicity of four objectives that transcend department or position give a big group a nimbleness and focus.

“Every week on Monday at 8 A.M., I evaluate these four factors with my leadership team,” Michelle said. “It can sometimes get frustrating, but repetition is a very powerful technique. We live and breathe our four objectives.”

Although she may sound like a broken record, Michelle knows that the success her team enjoys from sharing and pursuing these objectives will minimize any frustration they will feel with the constant repetition.

Michelle uses her refrain to focus a team on what is important in a large organization, to provide a common language, and to help develop a common theme and brand. When so many people are working on so many different tasks at a large institution like Bank of America, coherence and teamwork result from the constant reinforcement of common goals.

“If you develop a common approach for an entire team to go about their work, it is likely that the work will yield better results and be more organized,” Michelle said. “So if we want to achieve our four objectives, I try to lead, coach, and manage my people with them clearly in mind.”

Michelle has an expression I love: “Be kind to people, but be cruel to time.” That summarizes how she approaches coaching the employees of her bank into keeping their eyes on their four main objectives.

She is as kind a coach as they come—I see her with a genuine interest in the professional advancement and skill development of her team. But she teaches a system in a way that reminds me of Eric Mangini’s work with the Jets. Both Michelle and Eric insist on methodical preparation because it maximizes the productive use of time. In each of their businesses, time is an even scarcer resource than talent.

Michelle shows how great coaches emphasize repetition of objectives. In fact, be it at a bank or on the field, what may seem irritating at first to players or staff can become a reliable and welcome system.

KEY POINTS

OBJECTIVES

• Understanding your objectives requires that you slow down and ask: What and why? What am I doing and why am I doing it?

• The clarity that results from the answers to these questions guides your next preparation steps, helps you see links with other tasks or goals, and keeps you from relying on impulse or intuition.

• Purpose-driven work leads to superior performance, and this principle emphasizes the importance of establishing a clear purpose before doing anything else.

• Steve Bisciotti shows how a clear and aggressive definition of objectives is the cornerstone of preparation. Steve sets his objectives and never blinks as he pursues them.

• Dr. Henry Taylor demonstrates the way in which objectives can be broken down into components to better understand and communicate them.

• Michelle Shepherd illustrates how the constant and clear repetition of objectives can become a key way to build a team’s morale and focus.