Business Goals, Objectives, Policies, and Structure

MPO: Management, Planning, and Organization

Goals

Goals are defined as the long-term strategic aims of the organization. Examples include consumer goals, product goals, operational goals, and secondary goals.

Objectives

Objectives are defined as the things a business wants to achieve in a certain time frame. Examples include business survival, maximizing profit, maximizing sales, boosting customer satisfaction, and expanding the business.

Policies

Policies are defined as the framework and structure a business works within. Examples include legal policy, human resources, health and safety policy, promotion and employment policy, and recruitment policy.

How They Contribute to Effective Management

• Goals provide a long-term look at what the company wants to achieve and provide management with an end goal in mind when planning objectives. This end goal ensures managers can effectively work toward it and gives employees a purpose within the business.
• Objectives allow businesses to have shorter, more focused aims. This established mechanism will help to support the goals of the business and give employees and managers a clearer pathway to the goals of the business. This increases the chance of smart decision-making.
• Policies provide the adequate framework required to obtain the objectives and goals. This is helpful because, in terms of legal policy, a business must fall within the established legislation as not to get in trouble with the government.
• Stakeholders: This helps to map out who has an interest and influence or can be affected by an organization. If a group can affect you, you have to be able to deal with them and understand who can affect your ability to create value for your customers.

Example Stakeholders

• Business Analysts: Interested in the financial information to determine how the business is doing.
• Owners: Interested in the overall success of the business.
• Managers: Interested in the success of their department and able to make wide decisions that could impact the success of the department.
• Employees: Interested in the security of their job and the benefits they can get.
• Suppliers: Interested in maintaining a good business relationship. They can break ties if not happy.
• Partners: Interested in sharing profits and success. If not happy with terms, they can break ties.
• Competition: Interested in any information they can gain on other companies.

Organizational Structure

Organizational structure is the typically hierarchical arrangement of lines of authority, communications, rights, and duties of an organization. Organizational structure determines how the roles, power, and responsibilities are assigned, controlled, and coordinated, and how information flows between the different levels of management. A structure depends on the organization's objectives and strategy.

In a centralized structure, the top layer of management has most of the decision-making power and has tight control over departments and divisions. In a decentralized structure, the decision-making power is distributed, and the departments and divisions may have varying degrees of independence.

Geographical Organizational Structure

Smart Co. is using a geographical organizational structure. This is when companies decentralize the functional areas. For example, unlike the product organizational structure, there may be a local marketing, finance, accounting, and research development person based in each region. For example, Smart Co. has regional CEOs in each region. They also should have marketing research managers in each region, since consumers in various areas have different tastes. The geographical structure will enable the company to better serve the local market.