From 10-minute deliveries to Iran’s red lines, goal managers must minimize human costs

Frederick Winslow Taylor, an early exponent, said it was about organizing work for optimal results. As a concept, it got a fillip from Peter Drucker, who expanded the scope of its role and laid special emphasis on clearly defined objectives. And as it gained ground, goal orientation began to get around as its primary lesson.

Today, targets stare at us from everywhere, be it at work or play, plans for the next hour or the rest of one’s life. Success often involves crunched timelines, stiff deadlines and thin red lines.

Most of these are harmless, regardless of how strictly they’re set. But if they happen to put lives at risk, then it is another matter altogether. Two cases in this week’s news, one local and the other global, pose tests of leadership wisdom. Both argue for human costs to be factored into key decisions on what’s being managed.

The first under management is a deadline. This week, Blinkit reportedly rolled back its 10-minute delivery promise upon being urged by India’s labour ministry to do so. Rival platforms are expected to follow. This speaks well of their public spirit. After all, snappily met home orders have been the key selling point of quick commerce, a market that arose on the back of crushed response times.

By design, the gap between an app swipe and doorbell ring was to be closed by algorithmic efficiency and dark-store networks, with road safety left to state enforcers. Yet, the risks borne by delivery agents in a scramble to deliver their wares has made it a job-hazard issue across urban zones of traffic chaos, which explains the Centre’s nudge to relax targets.

Granted, Q-com players cannot afford to slacken off, let alone abandon their business model. Even so, since every life and limb counts, an ease-up on the clock must not end up as an empty gesture. As an earnest effort, gig platform managers could deploy safety drives and campaigns aimed at a consensual reset of market norms (if not traffic).

The other thing under management, a matter of global consequence, is a red line. This is not a literal tick-down of time, but a do-not-cross limit set by the US for protestor blood shed in Iran, beyond which the White House had warned it’s “locked and loaded" for action.

What began as a thin red line has thickened over the week as the Iranian toll of street deaths has spiked under Tehran’s crackdown. While America’s leader has signalled that “help" is on its way, Uncle Sam’s greater goal looks like regime change, which means the stakes are very high in terms of lives at risk.

The US calculus would need to include inputs like the likelihood of faulty intel on the nuclear threat of an adversary that might opt to fight till the end. Even if the odds suggest that surgical strikes can safely be carried out to weaken the Iranian regime’s grip on power, the eventual death toll likely to be notched up cannot be kept off scenario maps of the future.

Human costs count and need to be minimized. In such delicate situations, haste could prove costly, especially if the line between goal orientation and goal fixation gets blurred.

Management, clearly, is far too complex to be stuffed into a nutshell. But for pithy advice, let’s recall Drucker again. Put every assumption to scrutiny, he advised, or goal-setting could become delusional.