The wrong target, clearly understood and consistently pursued, will result in greater progress than the best target that receives less than full attention. The humble person will accept that his or her targets will often be wrong. But the pure in heart will not allow the potential of being wrong dissuade them from focus, discipline, and doing what is possible.
The same humility will also help avoid obsession over the wrong target or confusing targets for purposes. Targets can change. Purposes should be much more persistent.
Target by Jasper Johns
Our ultimate purpose, according to Jesus, is to claim our authentic self and contribute to a just community. The targets we choose for advancing this purpose are important, but always provisional, and sometimes wrong, but still potentially helpful.
Bob Waterman and Tom Peters have argued famously that “attention is all there is.” According to these long-time McKinsey consultants the most important job of a manager is to decide what will be given attention.
How does change come about? First, and not so obvious it is the quantity of attention paid to the matter at hand rather than the quality, odd as that statement might sound. When senior folks… start to focus on a newish “it”… then the rest of the organization starts to pay attention to “it.” And what gets attended to gets done. Thus, if you want to focus on quality, Focus on quality, period. If you haven’t focused on quality a lot before, you won’t know exactly what to talk about at first. Conversations will drag, will be abstract. It doesn’t matter a whit. Everybody will eventually get the drift – that you’re focused on quality (and not some other, former priority – and equally important message). It doesn’t have to be a good conversation about quality, just a conversation about quality. In some fashion, pay significant attention to the blemmies, and somehow the blemmie rate goes down. Not because of a specific program you invented, but because of the energy that comes to be focused on “it.” (Peters and Austin, page 270)
The purpose is fulfilling the potential of the enterprise. The current target is reducing the blemmie rate. The clear motive can contribute to achieving the ultimate purpose.
Is reducing the blemmie rate the crucial target that must be achieved to advance the purposes of the enterprise? Who can know for certain? But if you sincerely perceive a crucial connection and you consistently pursue the target you should, at least, further clarify the relationship between that target and your purpose – as long as you do not confuse target with purpose.
This confusion was the fundamental error of the Pharisees. In their pursuit of righteousness the Pharisees developed a series of very ambitious targets. They pursued the targets – mostly related to pious living – with great consistency but too often without much self-criticism.
Overtime many Pharisees forgot their original motivation and purpose, and replaced it with satisfaction in achieving targets. Rather than righteousness, they settled for self-righteousness.
Clarity, sincerity, consistency, and humility are keys to being pure in heart. If we are very clear about our purposes, sincere in selecting targets to advance those purposes, consistent in pursuing our targets, and humble in assessing progress in achieving our purposes we are much more likely to differentiate the real from the unreal. For Jesus the ultimate reality is knowing God.
In business our realities are considerably less profound.
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