The Strategy of Goals

After some thought and reading the next section on strategy, I summarized what I understood from the text book as the following: Strategy is specific actions needed to accomplish goals (measurable steps) that are directed toward and required to achieve an objective, vision, or mission.

It is hard for me to separate objective and goal as they seem synonymous.  The free online dictionary defines an objective to be "something worked toward or striven for" and a goal to be "the purpose toward which an endeavor is directed".  This is all somewhat confusing.

The text book states as much, and goes on further define objective as "a compelling business need that an organization must meet to achieve its vision and mission" (Reynolds 38) and a goal as "a specific result that must be achieved to reach an objective" (Reynolds 39).

The text book seems to present an objective as something rather abstract, where as goals are something that can be measured to achieve that goal.

References

• Reynolds, George W. Information Technology for Managers. Boston: Cengage Learning, Inc., 2009.