Management By Objectives - MBO

  

Categories: Company Management

It’s a lot easier to do our job when we know what we’re supposed to be doing. That's the theory behind MBO, or “management by objectives.” MBO says that, not only should everyone in an organization know what they should be doing (and what the organization itself is trying to do), but they should have official, established goals and targets to help them get there.

One of the best ways to illustrate this idea is with the concept of cascading goals. Let’s say our hat-making company, Oh Chapeau, Inc., sets an organizational goal to increase revenue by 25% within the next two years. Our Operations Manager then creates a goal for her division based on the organizational goal: they’re going to cut operational expenses by 10% within the same time period. She cascades this goal down to her supervisors and asks them each to create a related goal. Her Supplies Manager, Lou, creates a goal to find a cheaper office supply vendor, and his assistant also sets a goal to better monitor office supply usage. All of these goals roll back up into the business’s primary objective: increasing revenue by 25% within the next two years. According to those that know these things, keeping goals aligned makes it a lot more likely that the organization will actually achieve them, which is why MBO can be a really successful management tool.

MBO isn’t just for operational staff, though. Divisions that maybe don’t have much to do directly with revenue—like the recruiting department, for example—can still tie job goals to Oh Chapeau’s financial objective. In this instance, maybe our Talent Acquisition Manager sets a goal to bring in six new supervisors and managers over the next two years that can help the company grow.

The point is this: when we know what’s going on, we can make better decisions and be more productive. That’s good for us, it’s good for our teams, it’s good for our company, and it’s good for our shareholders. Goodie.

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And finance Allah shmoop How do product choice decisions work

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I cast my brass off is the best purveyor of

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fine coffee in the world at least according to them

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So they essentially offered three sets of products retail coffee

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roasting equipment and coffee beans Last year they did two

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million bucks of sales from their coffee bar outside the

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store In warehouse they sold fourteen million dollars worth of

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roasting equipment and nine million dollars worth of beans is

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either is Kona Shmona Whatever But on a total of

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twenty five million dollars in sales they lost a million

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dollars and their credit lines are tapped and well they

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have to start making money They just aren't sure how

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to do it Luckily they're all watching this video The

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backstory Most companies sell more than one product and each

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product carries different profit margins or contribution margins of dough

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back to the company Each product also carries more needs

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for resource is like in order to sell the roasting

01:00

equipment the company has to employ super smart people who

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really know their stuff and are selling to coffee aficionados

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who really know their stuff So hiring those people is

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well expensive versus the simple baristas who don't even need

01:14

a high school education outside you know serving coffee to

01:17

retail customers who barely need to be literate and will

01:20

someday you know have those Maurice does basically be replaced

01:23

by robots totally different resource needs for those two very

01:27

different products And the presumption here is that well maybe

01:30

resource is should be allocated away from the very expensive

01:34

to service and probably lower margin coffee roasting materials And

01:38

instead a serve more coffee outside with cheap labor you

01:42

know that eventually be replaced by robots That case maybe

01:45

maybe not all rights Let's turn the lens here On

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another example if you have a stationary store like one

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that sells high quality papers for weddings funerals bar mitzvahs

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and pet birthdays you know that kind of stationery store

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not one that just stands Still it wouldn't be crazy

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to have that business self three million dollars worth of

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paper and contribute only one hundred grand in pre tax

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profits because paper sales are highly competitive and very low

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profit margin And well there's Amazon And then there's the

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mom and pop stationery biz with three little old ladies

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in the back room happy to make minimum wage as

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they draw calligraphy all day Well that biz might only

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have three hundred grand of sales but contributes a one

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hundred twenty thousand in profits only one tenth of the

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revenue it contributes Maurin profits so profit margins matter and

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the character or style or structure of the business that

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product lines are in matters a whole lot Okay back

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to coffee I cast my brass off has similar dynamics

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First think about the retail store because it's serving food

02:44

It has to hold certain standards of cleanliness You know

02:47

city ratings and payoff To inspect a contributions Teo inspections

02:52

and something like that they have to offer parking and

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have various benefits to employees It takes ten employees to

02:57

serve two million dollars in coffee at average load to

03:00

the company of sixty grand each or six hundred thousand

03:02

dollars a year In employee costs that is each employee

03:05

makes forty five grand a year and then cost to

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the company Another fifteen grand in pension benefits insurance over

03:11

time Another cost To keep mall employees Well then it

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has to rent the extra finished non warehouse space Another

03:16

hundred grand a year city inspections and that whole cleanliness

03:20

thing Then add another hundred grand a year in cost

03:22

And then there's the coffee itself and cups and washing

03:25

and breakage and product things that add another two hundred

03:28

Well it's reasonably profitable as a unit It contributes about

03:32

a million dollars to the bottom line is pretty good

03:34

and the owner's love it because the people who drink

03:36

there are coffee snobs and give almost free market research

03:40

in describing what they like or don't like about a

03:43

given roast Then there's the roasting equipment business flew high

03:47

end people high end product The owner's complain all the

03:49

time about the high salaries of the people who sell

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the equipment The company doesn't make each roasting been theyjust

03:55

assemble it and then titrate it so that it can

03:58

chemically optimize whatever customer grind that the other coffee shops

04:02

want to build and serve on their own will The

04:04

network of coffee shops is amazing and they all respect

04:08

I cast my brass off because the PhDs in coffee

04:11

who make the equipment are also awesome on fourteen million

04:15

dollars or revenues The company when inspecting everything as a

04:18

standalone business meaning if they shut down the coffee retail

04:21

biz and the bean distribution biz well they'd have eight

04:24

million dollars in hardware product cost two million in assembly

04:28

cost and another two million in well everything else from

04:31

insurance toe warehousing shipping the website management so on So

04:34

this is odd The retail coffee biz pours a million

04:38

bucks in profits to eye CalFed and this business on

04:41

fourteen million in revenues pours in another two million So

04:44

the beans biz must be where the problem is At

04:47

nine million in revenues it's losing over four million bucks

04:51

Why spoilage Bad marketing campaigns high import taxes or duties

04:57

Ah highly competitive marketplace with everyone from grocery stores toe

05:01

Amazon being better at selling beans while the process was

05:05

the business love child of the idiot son of the

05:08

founder a common problem in American business But here the

05:11

process of selling mass beans into the consumer marketplace requires

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a different skill versus selling high end coffee to snobs

05:19

The disconnect shined a light on the resource constraints in

05:22

human capital Not enough cos focus on this element the

05:26

brains of their employees and the ability to collectively contribute

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to good or optimal answers in resource allocation You know

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that's what it's all about Huge amounts of resource is

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were being poured into growing a being distribution business which

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is a low margin Almost anyone could do this thing

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kind of business Instead of taking the nicely profitable retail

05:45

store in high end roasting business and being just nicely

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profitably happy well the constraint here was the capital deployed

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into the money losing commodity business of being selling and

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sacrificing the ability to integrate even further backward in the

05:57

Assembly of the roasting hardware like they could have maybe

06:00

made a lot of profit over time and began building

06:02

their own Rose Sing hardware which they're also good at

06:05

Well the optimal resource allocation then takes the scarce resource

06:08

of human knowledge and making coffee roasters for small snooty

06:12

cafes And it spends more on that process shutting down

06:16

the mail order beans Direct marketing biz Well the change

06:20

makes the company go from losing a mil a year

06:23

so to making a few mil in cash profits which

06:26

it can then deploy Leveraging the genius coffee roasting brains

06:29

It already has to become more powerful in that smaller

06:33

but way higher margin business So that's one view or

06:37

one lens on how product choice decisions work in a

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nutshell or well in a coffee bean shelf maybe something 00:06:43.058 --> [endTime] like that No

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