During a recent conversation with a leader who was preparing a balanced scorecard for his business, I was asked how many objectives he should have. I have been advising businesses for years that they need to have no more than 15 to 18 objectives across the four perspectives of their scorecard. This is fine for large organisations that can share the objectives across all their managers.

​But what can you do if you run a small business?

Many businesses are very good at creating a mountain of documentation. We are great at creating new documents. We are not so good at getting rid of the old documents and so we build this ‘mountain’.

​Recently I was asked to provide advice to a business on the preparation of documentation that would meet the new Ministry of Primary Industries requirements under the Food Act 2015. The business had begun to prepare a new management system around the clauses of Regulation 110. ​