Making Your Aims Clear

As business people we all have aims, both long term and more immediate, but how many of us that employ staff make our aims clear to  our managers, supervisors and staff ?

Do your staff spend hours on non-essential work because they think that it’s important – how much of this work is really useful to you as a business owner and how much of the work being done is because you haven’t told your staff clearly what your aims are.

This is not an uncommon or new problem though, below is an actual letter written by the Duke of Wellington in 1812 in the middle of the war with Napoleon.

It is a timeless example of how people need to know what their aims are and the need to not have to account for matters that are not that important.

Gentlemen,

Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests which have been sent by H.M. ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our headquarters.

We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for, with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence.

Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain.  This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.

This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains.  I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below.  I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both:

1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or perchance:

2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.

– Duke of Wellington, to the British Foreign Office, London, 1812

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