All ye ma friends who are in sales would be very familiar with this truth. On second thoughts, every person who has ever participated in target setting exercise for each member of his/her team and forwarded a single target of the team to his/her boss would acknowledge this universal truth that THE WHOLE IS ALWAYS LESS THAN THE SUM (of each individual targets) :) :)
The process is very simple here. Suppose my boss gives me a target of 40 tonnes. Now its upto me to break up this number of 40 TONNES as a target to each member of my team as per his capability. So according to calculations if four members of the team are to get a target like 8T, 13T, 7T and 12 T ... I end up giving gud-looking fully rounded numbers like 10T, 15T, 10T and 15T respectively. Now how i reach these final numbers is due a quality called 'Rounding off to the nearest higher integer of 5'.... [ God only knows why and how this number 5 gets so much importance ;) ;) ] ....
Thus the team's total target actually looks like 50 TONNES :) :) but if you ask the boss, he would say the team s targeting to achieve 40T ... now doesnt that prove that the WHOLE IS ALWAYS LESS THAN THE SUM OF INDIVIDUALS
Im sure the boss would also have done the same thing while telling me that my team's target is 40T... Going by the same law the actual number would have been somewhat like 37 or 38 T!!!??!! ;)
In management we might call this 'Bull-whip effect' (to some extent)... psychological experts say this works because "You should always aim higher" n blah blah blah...
But we sales people know this phenomenon by "Boss pata nahi kaise target set karta hai!!!" :D :D
... So next time (if in sales) u feel your target looks as if it s just landed from Mars... try working it backwords!!! ;) ;)
What if all that the team has is 40T of product(which too may be more, as you pointed out)...do the team members fight for the overlapping 10T? or cough up the extra 10T from thin air and show that the've sold as being asked....also interesting is the fact that atleast 2 out of the 4 are bound to miss the target! in this approach...leading to bad appraisal :P
ReplyDeletefirstly , if you plan 40T as sales targets, the production plus holding stock is always atleast 1.5 times... so sumwher around 60T... hence this scenario rarely ever arises.
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