Congratulations. You’ve made it through the first half of 2012 and I’m sure you are more than 50% complete on all the goals you set for 2012…right? If you are like me you might be surprised to find out that the year is half way done!

Now is the time when great companies (and individuals) are gathering together their troops and resetting their objectives for the last 6 months of the year.

As reported in a recent Fortune Magazine article, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently asked all of his employees to attend a meeting at their Menlo Park headquarters. This meeting was called as the company was preparing to go public and most people assumed that Zuckerberg was going to talk about the upcoming IPO. He surprised them all by focusing on the organization’s execution goals for the rest of 2012. He was not focused on what everyone was talking about or what was going on outside the organization, but he called the meeting to refocus his team on the goals they needed to accomplish this year!

Regardless of how successful or unsuccessful you have been in the first 6 months of 2012, you have a clean slate for the next 6 months. Gather your team together and answer the following questions:

1. What are the 3 most important goals we could accomplish in the next 6 months?
2. Of those 3 goals, what is the one most important goal?
3. Who should own that one goal? What do they need to accomplish that goal?
4. How can we follow up on the progress of that goal each week?

I know. Restricting yourself to one primary goal feels horribly limiting. Accomplishing great things for your organization requires extreme focus. If you get the first goal done early, you can move on to the next one. Start with just one!

If two of your goals are distinct enough that accomplishing the goals does not require efforts or input from the same people, you can have two distinct teams working on their own goals separately. Only do this if you are sure that you can put the organizational focus on both goals at once.

Research shows that the more goals we chase at once, the less likely we are to accomplish any of them. Now is the time. Gather your team. Pick your most important goal for the remainder of 2012 and start walking it out. Make the last 6 months of 2012 great!

About Curt Fowler

Curt Fowler is the President and Founder of Fowler & Company, a business advisory firm founded to help its clients maximize the value of their organizations. Curt is a Certified Public Accountant and earned his Masters in Accountancy from the University of Georgia. He also earned an MBA in Strategy and Entrepreneurship from the Kellogg School at Northwestern. He has spent 20 years studying and learning from some of the best businesses in America including Verizon, Sara Lee, Cox Communications and many more.