We are starting a new tradition here at Managers Tools for releasing our setting goalscast over the Christmas week.

Many people take the quiet time around the holidays to think about the coming year and set personal, professional, and business goals.

To support you in that, we will release three goals

cast over the coming three weeks. This week, How to Set Annual Goals, good place to start.

This was originally a three-part cast, but we've mashed it together into one fairly

a long one so that you don't have to go looking for the different parts.

After this introduction to the introduction, you'll hear me introduce the cast and then you'll

hear me twice more at the beginning of each of the second and third parts.

If you need to pause, those would be good moments to do so. Happy Christmas everyone.

Welcome to Manager Dools. Today's topic, how to set annual goals, part one of three. Hi everyone this is Mike and welcome to manager tools many managers are are going through goal setting efforts right now for 2008.

And typically at this time of year we get lots of questions about goals and goal setting.

Sometimes they're dispiriting.

Managers spend an awful lot of time wordsmithing their intent into corporate frameworks.

All that time would be far better spent thinking about goals themselves

and how the achievement of those goals will help the organization.

A lot of managers also have to create goals that are smart and as you'll find in today's

cast we don't recommend you're doing so unless you have to. We just like them so much. We almost call this cast,

Smart Goals are stupid. Yeah, yeah, we really don't like them. In fact, we spend a good bit of our time in our introduction talking about smart goals, so beware.

The fact that the technique is so widespread and so often ineffective causes us to want to address

it fully.

And hey, who would have thought that our answer would be

M.T. goals?

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