If I told you that I had made 17 new year’s resolutions — everything from doing more work and exercise to spending more time with my family — you’d probably suspect that I was being overambitious. If I went on to explain that I’d broken my goals down into 169 targets, you might conclude that I was both excessively fastidious and doomed to failure.
Yet those are precisely the number of targets that the world set itself in 2015, when 193 countries at the UN General Assembly agreed on the sustainable development goals to improve the planet and the quality of human life on it. Although they gave themselves 15 years, they were also setting themselves up for a fall.
Comparing SDGs and their subparts to New Year’s Resolutions is silly, in my humble opinion. Many firms everywhere have started to look at them to try to guide themselves, starting with one or a handful at a time.
Corporations and for-profit orgs now have an alternative mandate they can pursue either alongisde or instead of infinitely increasing profit.
Agreed, the UN and global governance aren’t a person and the comparison is less than helpful.
Setting goals and developing a framework for metrics is effective.
