OGSM
Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures
What is OGSM?
- A one-page plan in four boxes: Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures
- Cascading, where a higher-level strategy becomes a lower-level objective
- The Strategies box should make clear what you will not do
OGSM’s simple format leads people to mistake it for “a table you finish once you fill in four blanks.” Its real value is not in filling it in but in forcing you to drop whatever won’t fit on one page. A business plan dozens of pages long can hold every department’s wish list; a one-page table can’t. Because what you leave out is the strategy, OGSM is less a writing tool than a tool that forces choices.
The four boxes form two pairs. The Objective is one sentence in words saying where you are heading, and the Goals are 3–5 numbers that tell you whether you got there. The Strategies state in words 3–5 choices on which to concentrate resources to achieve the goals, and the Measures are the numbers that show whether each strategy is progressing. Words and numbers, what and how, alternate, so the format screens out both plans that are all slogans and plans that are all numbers.
The way it cascades is the strength of this framework. One strategy line in the company-wide OGSM becomes the objective of a division OGSM, and the division’s strategy in turn becomes a team’s objective. Because the “how” above becomes the “what” below, team leads can immediately explain where the top line of their own table came from. HR and training managers can try writing their training plan in this format. If you can’t copy a company strategy statement straight into the Objectives box, that training has lost its link to strategy.
The Strategies box is where it most often goes wrong in practice. Lines like “strengthen sales capability” or “improve cost competitiveness” are not strategies; they are the goal restated. A strategy should make clear which customers, with what offer, and in what way, and a reader should be able to infer from it what you will not do. The second pitfall is filling each box with eight or nine lines until one page becomes three. The third is drafting it at the start of the year and then framing it for the wall. An OGSM whose measures nobody reviews monthly stays a nicely made poster.
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of “B2B Marketing Design”
Kwangdong MinExpert in business models, revenue models, and market researchIt spread after it became known that global consumer goods companies, including Procter & Gamble (P&G), used it as a business planning tool. However, no official document names who first devised it or when, so it is safest to treat it as a framework refined through corporate practice.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A makes household goods, with 450 employees and annual revenue of KRW 130 billion (≈ US$97,261,700). Every year it produced a 68-page business plan, but when 32 team leaders were asked for this year’s company-wide goals, only 5 got all three right.
- A planning team lead moved a 68-page business plan onto a single OGSM page and ended up with 17 strategy statements. The CEO sent it back to be cut down again: “Doing all seventeen means you haven’t chosen anything.”
- After two rounds of debate, the management meeting narrowed the strategies to three: expand online direct sales, focus on the premium detergent line, and phase out slow-moving items. The other 14 were listed separately under “things we won’t do this year.”
- Each strategy got two measures. Online direct sales were tracked by repurchase rate and direct-sales share of revenue, and product-line consolidation by SKU count and inventory turnover days, all to be reviewed at the first management meeting each month.
- The head of sales copied the company strategy “expand online direct sales” word for word into the Objectives box of the division OGSM, then wrote three division strategies beneath it. The team tables went one level further down in the same way.
- The training lead tried writing the training plan in the same format and found that 7 of the 24 existing courses connected to no strategy at all. Four of them were discontinued and replaced with direct-sales operations training.
- A year later, 27 of 32 team leads could answer the same question by naming all three company goals. The number of SKUs fell from 1,240 to 870, and inventory turnover days dropped from 61 to 44.