What Is More Important In Business, Process Or Result?

On the question: “What is important for business?” There is an opinion that the result is needed, and the process is secondary. If you eventually achieve the goal, they say it does not matter by what means it was done or how much it cost you. The process itself is NOT essential, but the goal is necessary.

But is it? If the price of success is, for example, a broken family relationship, can we talk about success at all in this case? Unlikely.

Let’s look at this question a little deeper and make sure that

To oppose the process and the result is wrong. In achieving any goal, both are important.

Let’s compare business with sports, and such a comparison is entirely appropriate because there is an element of competition and competition here. We can say that the result of the race always depends on how the process was set up, that is, on training. An athlete, movement, dreams of an Olympic award. But if he is not interested in training, if he does not enjoy victories over himself, he is unlikely to “run” to his dream since, figuratively speaking, he will not have enough “breath.”

Let’s consider that many modern business people are taught to take a hobby, a favorite thing, as the basis of their business. They will pay considerable attention to the process.

If you like what you do, you will be more creative in solving problems. While working for a result, a person does not yet see the fruits of his work, but the interest feeds him. It is the fascination of the process that helps him overcome difficulties.

Managers, for whom the goal is most important, may treat their employees with disdain. Yes, sometimes toughness is needed in business, and in the end, the meaning of any work as a result, but it is essential when the process itself gives pleasure to a person or a team. Otherwise, what’s the point in it? The moment of receiving the crown of glory is short-term, but the path to this award can be a life-long one. And if the process itself, the same way to achieve the goal, was uninteresting, then what is the point of the reward?

Process, Result And Model of Excellence

There are perfect business models (excellence models, more abbreviated) against which businesses can self-evaluate. These models are also used to organize and hold prestigious competitions.

So, the model of excellence is built so that processes and results are present in it in a proportion of 50 to 50. A perfect business is perfect when it has equally well-developed methods and stable positive results.

What do they come from when creating such models in the proportion of 50 to 50? From the fact that if there is an excellent result, the processes of the enterprise (business) are not built up perfectly. The repeatability of the results is very doubtful. It turns out that an enterprise (business) that demonstrates excellent results (including over a long period) but is also unable to verify its processes in a classy way may not confirm the brand of a successful enterprise in the future, like this.

At the same time, it happens the other way around: the processes are built up, even if you demonstrate achievements at the exhibition, but, alas, there is no result worthy of these processes. This may mean that these processes have just been built, and the results will have to wait a bit. Or it means the focus of the enterprise (business) on the process.

The situation called “process for the sake of process” is the way to increase costs, to demotivate staff, to change concepts, and, ultimately, this is the way to business bureaucratization and loss of competitive advantages.

This means that if both the prevalence of the result over the process and the focus on strategies to the detriment of the results are alarming, then it is necessary to achieve the “golden mean,” the proportion of 50 to 50.

It remains to understand how to digitize processes and results and determine these proportions between methods and results, based, for example, on the models of excellence already mentioned. But that, as they say, is an entirely different story…

Also Read: Five Reasons To Create A Business Plan