Are goals the way to change?
An excerpt from Wharton’s review: In early 1969, just as the U.S. was preparing to reach John F. Kennedy’s lofty goal of sending Americans to the moon, the famed Ford executive Lee Iacocca gave a similarly ambitious mandate to his team of engineers. Faced for the first time with competition from low-cost, high-mileage foreign imports, Iacocca set a specific target: Ford would design a new automobile that weighed less than 2,000 pounds and sold for under $2,000, and it would be on the showroom floor in time for the 1971 model year. What resulted was a mad dash to create the Ford Pinto. It seems many of the worst blunders in business can be said to be in-part due to the poor use of goals: Sears overcharging for car work in the Nineties, Enron not evaluating the actual profitability of the deals its salesforce made, and maybe even No Child Left Behind. Like pain meds for talk radio hosts, goals have be over-prescribed in organizations. The review goes on to quote past MX Conference keynote and organizational behavior expert Chip Heath of Stanford University, who “found that people tend to think that other people need extrinsic rewards more often than they really do…. To us, our work is interesting and meaningful, but we tend to think that other people come to work because of money.” This is one reason I like when organizations focus on concrete things. Prototypes, pictures, whatever tangible thing they want to focus on to make happen in the world. Things make it easier to consider consequences and make results visible to everyone in the organization. Prototypes and other things certainly may not address every situation (e.g., sales targets), but I think they move groups of people closer to the intrinsic reward that is both interesting and meaningful. [photo by chadmiller]
We’ve all heard JFK’s goal to send an man to the moon within the decade. At workplaces, we use goals to set targets and motivate each other. I myself am very goal oriented. But theWharton School of Business has a great reviewof a new paper by Lisa D. Ordóñez from the Eller College of Management and Adam D. Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management titled, “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting.”
