That was a phrase bandied about the business community decades ago. It came out of the work by Peter Drucker in his book The Practice of Management published in 1954. It has been greatly modified and expanded since then and garnered more than four millions hits when Googled.
Rather than tackle individual solutions of a multi-faceted problem one would look at the desired end result and work backwards to find the decision points that would lead to the sought-for result. That seems counterintuitive, rather like winning the race first, then deciding how you had done it. We like to tackle the first problem, get that resolved and move on to the next level. Anyone who has worked in a cumbersome committee knows the frustration of finding that there were unintended consequences down the line that could have been avoided if a broader view had been taken. In its simplest form MBO, as it became known, is a set of organization goals and then worked out a way to achieve them.
One wonders if that can be done on even a broader scale than the operation of a company. Do you suppose society could operate that way or are we too diverse for that to be possible? It is easier to see how the production of a particular product could lend itself to technique, but what about a nation with so many different aspirations, talents, and hopes for the future, a society with countless problems?
We have heard every conceivable solution to the problem of guns in the country. It seems to me to be a classic case of when all is said and done much more will have been said than done. Surely no one is going to be happy with the way this turns out in the short term. Could reduction of violence from firearms be approached as a goal and worked back rather than fighting the endless skirmishes with every interest group and in the end no one is satisfied?
Let’s indulge in a little fantasy show. Let’s make list of how we would like America to look in the year 2063. For young folk, trust me, it will be here before you know it. For anyone over 40 . . . maybe the best we can hope for is that we will have left behind a few good ideas.
We can agree on broad principles and everyone can make their own list. The real issue will be making MBO work in such a broad societal setting.
- We would like to see the elimination of poverty both here and in the third world. Right there, we know the second part is impossible, but leave it on the list anyway.
- We would like to have health care available to everyone and at an affordable cost.
- We would like there to be peace on earth and goodwill to all.
- We would like to have everyone achieve the maximum success available to them.
- We would like honest government who recognized that we need their help but not their interference. It’s very hard to see how that would work; one person’s help is another person’s interference when it comes to the government.
- We would like to have a safe environment where we do not add to the vagaries of climate but anticipate what we can do to ameliorate the natural cyclic changes to which our planet will continue to expose us.
- We would like to see violent death by any means, but particularly by guns, a rare event. For murder by gun we would like to see the massive number of annual deaths by firearms reduced to a fraction of the present carnage.
The list could go on . . . and it should. You might well say that’s all a fantasy world and you would be correct – particularly if no one takes the long view to discover why we are such a violent and self-interested species.
There are two things that are certain: I won’t be around to see it and for those who will be here it won’t happen unless some fundamental changes in human behavior are addressed.
– Hayden Hollingsworth
