Optimally, your company’s budget should be an elegant financial expression of a tight, cohesive storyline that explains how tactics and execution in the upcoming year align with the company’s purpose, long-term vision, and master (or top level) goals.

Did we grouse about how busy we were? Maybe a little, but for the most part we just got after it. Our spouses were incredibly supportive and were involved in the business from the start—stuffing envelopes, talking to customers, and packing boxes of soft-cover books to be shipped to all corners of the globe.

As I look back, the work didn’t feel like work. We had entered a flow state.

Goal setting within a business can be fraught with start-stops, discontinuity, extra-processing, and long wait times from ideation to implementation. Poorly designed goals that do not connect up, down, and across an organization can do more harm than good. That harm evidences itself in the form of team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance. Moreover, if corporate goals change too frequently, the organizational change management curve and many individual contributor change management curves can’t keep up, leading to–you guessed it–team mistrust, employee dissatisfaction, failed projects, and poor performance.