The Goal

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gem of a product in its day. And then investors gave him more money so they could make a bundle and J. Bart could make an even bigger one.

But is making money the only goal? What are all these other things I've been worrying about?

I reach for my briefcase, take out a yellow legal pad and take a pen from my coat pocket. Then I make a list of all the items people think of as being goals: cost-effective purchasing, employ- ing good people, high technology, producing products, produc- ing quality products, selling quality products, capturing market share. I even add some others like communications and customer satisfaction.

All of those are essential to running the business successfully. What do they all do? They enable the company to make money. But they are not the goals themselves; they're just the means of achieving the goal.

How do I know for sure?

Well, I don't. Not absolutely. But adopting "making money" as the goal of a manufacturing organization looks like a pretty good assumption. Because, for one thing, there isn't one item on that list that's worth a damn if the company isn't making money.

Because what happens if a company doesn't make money? If the company doesn't make money by producing and selling products, or by maintenance contracts, or by selling some of its assets, or by some other means... the company is finished. It will cease to function. Money must be the goal. Nothing else works in its place. Anyway, it's the one assumption I have to make.

If the goal is to make money, then (putting it in terms Jonah might have used), an action that moves us toward making money is productive. And an action that takes away from making money is non-productive. For the past year or more, the plant has been moving away from the goal more than toward it. So to save the plant, I have to make it productive; I have to make the plant make money for UniCo. That's a simplified statement of what's happening, but it's accurate. At least it's a logical starting point.

Through the windshield, the world is bright and cold. The sunlight seems to have become much more intense. I look around as if I have just come out of a long trance. Everything is familiar, but seems new to me. I take my last swallow of beer. I suddenly feel I have to get going.