Why setting goals can backfire

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/15/ready_aim____fail/?page=full

by robg • 17 years ago

30 9 17 years ago

boston.com

padmanabhan01• 17 years ago

Is this not about setting the wrong goal, as against setting a goal itself?

paulbaumgart• 17 years ago

Yeah, but that doesn't make nearly as interesting a headline. :-)

dextrocardia• 17 years ago

Setting the goal was not the problem here: the problem was the way they chose to achieve that goal. Building better cars might, rather than doing everything to sell crappy ones, would have had a much better chance for success.

teej• 17 years ago

That's a matter of setting the right goal. Perhaps "make better cars" would have been appropriate goal, insetad of "make more money".

Tamerlin• 17 years ago

Making more money is an ok goal, though a bit too general for practical use.

The problem comes from a short-sighted approach to making more money now at the expense of making money later, which is what GM did. If they'd decided to sell more cars by making better ones, it probably would have taken longer to get to that point, but they'd have been in a much better position to compete with the other car makers.

puzzle-out• 17 years ago

They could have decided to produce something completely different, like nokia, that old world-leading manufacturer of rubber galoshes.

JunkDNA• 17 years ago

This article made me realize that goal setting is really a specialized case of "beware of the metrics you set". Whatever you decide to measure is always what people focus on, so you need to be darn sure you're measuring the correct things or you end up with huge distortions in people's behavior.

ssanders82• 17 years ago

This is something that Joel Spolsky has hammered on repeatedly, regarding employee motivation - http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-si...

gojomo• 17 years ago

The paper referenced by the story, from business professors at Northwestern, UPenn, U of Arizona, and HBS, is titled "Goals Gone Wild". (Since both the Boston Globe and the submitter resisted the temptation to use that as the hed, I had to mention it.)

The abstract and full paper (PDF) are available at:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6114.html

Why setting goals can backfire

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