THE LEAFLET
September 18 2025
an organization is a goal, how to set goals (for the whole org), the inevitability of ops
AN ORGANIZATION IS A GOAL
My take on "why set goals?" is that, by definition, an organization is a goal. This is why an organization has a mission and why its mission will probably be its most defining characteristic. It's why organizations in similar fields with different missions are so different from each other. It's why organizations that do similar things on different trajectories function so differently. The mission defines the organization.
When you are, by definition, One Big Goal, you have to back-chain all your activity from that goal. Guiding all your activity is very hard to do if you don't create sub-goals below the overarching, mission-level goal that operate at the annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, or daily- and project-level.
I think my response to the contention that this doesn't apply to an organization that experiences a lot of flux in the market or a lot of change in the landscape is to say, "I don't know why you think you're that special. So many effective, goal-driven organizations are in that flux and the typical way they respond to that is by saying, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we still exist.'"
So if the way we want to approach research changes or AI development timelines objectively shift, we choose to still exist as an organization. We are essentially saying: we are still committed to the one big goal.
There is at the very least one big goal that is never changing. That goal doesn’t fluctuate but the sub-goals you aim at to reach that big goal might fluctuate a good bit. You want to be choosy about the time periods for which you are creating sub-goals. If you expect to experience a ton of flux, then you would probably choose quarterly goals that are back-chained from the mission rather than annual goals that are back-chained from the mission. Things may be volatile enough that you need monthly or weekly goals, and plenty of organizations do all of the above.
An important question to ask is what if you stopped doing this goal-setting and goal-chasing? You would effectively be saying "I am not sure about the degree to which we are accomplishing our big goal.” That helpless uncertainty is what goal-setting at the smaller level is designed to prevent.
-ben
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HOW TO SET GOALS (FOR THE WHOLE ORG)
To set goals for your organization, I tend to recommend answering these questions :
What are we all (at this organization) trying to make real in the long run (e.g. over the next 10-50 years)?
What does that mean we ideally accomplish by the end of this year?
If we're doing that, let's imagine it's the end of this year. We did it! What does that mean that everybody in this room worked on?
Set goals for those things. To do this, you may have to go team by team before you get to individuals on each team. (ex: Sales is going to do x; for Sales to achieve x, Chris on the Sales team needs to do y).
By the time you’ve done this team by team, it's fairly easy to create an individual teammate's goals from the team goal.
The thing you hope to be true a year from now isn't necessarily a capped outcome or a specific project. It could be, for example, how much the organization has grown.
For many businesses, this would sound like, “We've increased market share to [this amount],” or, “we've become the market leader in [this thing].” In more social impact-driven organizations, it could be something like, “we are the go-to resource for key organizations on [this topic].” It could also be a more quantitative capture of that idea, something like, “We have readership and subscription to our ideas at [this level].”
It does not have to be a thing that is set and once said is set forever. You place the overall trajectory of the organization on the timetable of a year or even a quarter if you like, then you reset goals at the end of each of those periods by returning to the original question: what are we all trying to make real in the long run?
-ben
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THE INEVITABILITY OF OPS
Operations work is inevitable, even in your most creative work. If you want your stuff to serve people beyond you, and especially if you want to offer an elastic supply of your stuff, so that you give more of it when people want more of it, you need reliable ways to turn ideas into stuff. That’s ops.
If you are doing something several times, you are building a machine to do that thing, whether you think of it that way or not. This means you also get to (get to! not have to) practice maintenance - you keep the machine in working order, replace and upgrade parts, run tests of its performance. Up to you whether that maintenance is a romantic endeavor that receives the shine and respect of your creative work or a drudge. That’s a question of attitude and values.
It’s also up to you whether you give due attention to the machine. Maybe you can do just fine with minimum viable ops. You don’t need fancy gear or tightly engineered workflows.
But it’s quite possible you can find more time to make the stuff you love making and you can make more of it for more potential fans if you go into the phonebooth and come out with your COO cape on and a prompt for GPT 5 Thinking or Claude Opus 4.1, even for an afternoon.
“If I thought of my work to produce [x] the way a world-class engineer or COO would, what are the machines or systems I’m relying on? What is my supply chain? What are my stocks and flows? Based on what you know of my work from our conversations and [these uploaded documents / calendar links], where could I enhance these operations, so my product is better and I can efficiently deliver more of it?”
-eric
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COMPELLING QUOTES
Investor Aparna Chennapragada on work as translation:
We tell ourselves we’re creating, building and executing, but when you zoom out, most of the day isn’t invention or execution. It’s TRANSLATION: taking something in one form and turning it into another form that someone else can act on.
A soap formula becomes a manufacturable soap bar, then a marketing claim, then a retail SKU, then a line on a P&L.A search algorithm becomes code, then a UI, then an ad unit, then a compliance report, then a board deck.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Lawyers translating risk into clauses. Engineers translating specs into code. PMs translating activity into status updates. Analysts translating logs into narratives. Finance translating transactions into statements. Sales translating pain points into proposals. Executives translating market noise into bets.
Author James Clear on pushing vs context:
If you want a plant to grow, you can fuss over it every day—watering, weeding, moving it toward the sun. Or you can place it in the right soil and let nature do most of the work. A seed planted in the right spot often thrives on its own. Life is much the same. Progress is not only about how hard you work, but also about where you decide to work.
Where is your energy better spent right now: pushing harder or planting yourself in better ground?
Historian Helen Castor on power and psychology:
What I find fascinating about the Middle Ages in England is that you’re looking at a very sophisticated structure of power, but it’s present in bare bones because we don’t have the great apparatus of state. Therefore, individual choices and individual psychology become extremely exposed, so it’s that point where skeletal structures of power are being inhabited by particular individuals, and how that plays out.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric