Glossary

Where a term is genuinely contested, this glossary says so rather than picking a winner. Several of the words below are used in mutually exclusive ways by sources that are all considered authoritative.

• Catchball: the negotiation that turns a top-down target into a bottom-up commitment. A draft goal passes up, down and sideways until the people who must deliver it have shaped it. Named in Hoshin Kanri, where it is a formal step with its own calendar.
• Committed goal: a goal the team is expected to fully achieve, where a miss calls for an explanation. Distinguished from an aspirational goal, and collapsing the two is the most common failure in goal-setting practice.
• Aspirational goal: a goal set beyond current reach, where partial achievement is the expected outcome. Only meaningful when scored on a different basis from a committed goal.
• Hoshin Kanri: a Japanese strategy-deployment method, the most formally specified annual planning cycle in circulation. Notable for catchball and for auditing the planning process itself, not only its results.
• Key result: a milestone that paces an objective and is built to expire. Distinct from a performance indicator, which tracks something continuously and has no end state.
• Management by objectives (MBO): the practice of setting objectives with milestones attached. Coined by Peter Drucker in the 1950s. Adapted at Intel by Andrew Grove, who used this name throughout for what is now marketed under a different acronym.
• Objective: a statement of where you intend to get to. On its own it carries no method, which is the distinction the strategy literature insists on.
• Operating cadence: the recurring calendar of planning and review events across a year, and the handoffs between them.
• Plan of record: the version of an annual plan that the organization actually operates against, as distinct from the version approved earlier in the cycle.
• Shindan: the annual diagnosis in Hoshin Kanri, in which senior leadership audits how the planning process ran rather than whether its goals were met. It has no common Western equivalent.
• Stretch goal: in the academic literature, a goal that is seemingly impossible given current capabilities, with a probability of attainment near zero. In common business use the phrase usually means something far easier, which is why the two literatures do not connect.
• Strategy: contested. The strategy literature holds that a strategy must name an obstacle, state what will not be done, and give a causal argument for the advantage. A list of goals meets none of those conditions, which is the point most often made against calling a goal list a strategy.
• Vital few: the small number of objectives an organization commits to above all others in a cycle. The principle appears in Hoshin Kanri and in Grove's account of management by objectives. Neither specifies a number.