
Consider Not Setting Goals in 2013 - apress
http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2012/12/consider-not-setting-goals-in.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+harvardbusiness+%28HBR.org%29
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dsr_
The point bears repeating: when you set an incentive tied to a measurable
target, you will get behavior that focuses on that target, even if everything
else has to suffer.

Give your CEO a bonus based on revenue, and profit will suffer. Base it on
profit, and quality will suffer. If you tell your customer service people to
bring down the average length of calls, they will do so by hanging up on
people. Tell them they have a bonus based on post-call satisfaction surveys,
and on-hold times will go up.

Those are all well-intentioned goals. If you set a really bizarre goal, things
can go really wrong. And if you don't set goals at all, nobody knows what you
think needs improvement.

Management is hard.

~~~
nostromo
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect>

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MattRogish
The really fun thing about this is that folks have realized this and, instead
of focusing on intrinsic motivation, have just added more metrics to try and
balance things out. Enter the "balanced scorecard" with 30 different metrics
that the manager or employees have little/no direct control over.

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263237399...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263237399000341)

Yes, the Balanced Scorecard has some use but I think it's still missing the
point.

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MDS100
So how do you create/increase intrinsic motivation? Giving them more freedom +
choosing their own goals (or at least let them think the goals are theirs)?

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paulsutter
I like the author's suggestion of setting a focus rather than a specific goal.
For example, weekly revenue growth rate (from pg's growth essay).

A company wide focus on growth rate can crystallize alignment on the most
important dimension. But setting a specific pass/fail goal ("growth will be 5%
a week") could reduce intrinsic motivation, cause weird short term behaviors,
and even cap the upside.

Benchmarks are very useful (5-7% is great, 1% means you're still lost, 10% is
a blockbuster), but there's no need to set a specific number. Just get
everyone rowing in the same direction.

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Spooky23
Personally, where I have control, I treat goals as objectives or things to
strive for vs. tasks or some sort of SLA.

Why? If you make goals checkboxes, you end up doing whatever is necessary to
meet the minimum criteria for "done". The article used a football quarterback
being given a financially backed goal of "Don't throw interceptions; if you
do, you will be penalized $X".

The lesson to be learned there isn't "Goals are bad". The lesson is "Don't
establish dumb goals".

I worked in a sales organization when I was in college that determined that
selling a specific high margin add-on product was critical to the
organizations success. They gave sales management the ability to cut margin on
the base product to increase sales of the add-on product. My incentive was
based on selling the add-on, and my boss's bonus was tied to the ratio of
base-product/high-margin product. His boss was paid based on ranking of total
_add-on_ product sales vs. his peers. Guess what happened? We sold the base
product at a loss, hit our KPIs, and made a bunch of money. The company did
not.

~~~
lutorm
_The lesson is "Don't establish dumb goals"._

I thought the point was that you can't anticipate the side effects setting a
goal will have. People are likely more creative in reaching it in ways you
didn't imagine.

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blasstula
What I gathered from the article is that conceptual goals are less prone to
deviation from your intentions than quantifiable ones.

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tchock23
Some of these examples have less to do with the fact that a goal was set, and
more to do with the fact that there was a financial incentive tied to it.

Financial incentives can have the side effect of reducing intrinsic motivation
(see Daniel Pink's book "Drive" for research and examples).

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_grace_
Set goals! Set goals! For the love of god, set goals! You'll make my startup
fail: <http://chizzl.com/>

~~~
stephengillie
Quickly! Pivot into setting focuses! You still have a window!

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apeace
I like to keep a light journal of tasks I accomplish every day. I think of
this as goals in reverse. It gives me a sense of accomplishment, similar to
achieving a goal, but at the same time allows me to focus on the present, as
the author suggests. Looking back on the journal also allows me to put the
present and the future in a well-defined perspective, which helps me give the
time estimates that business types inevitably require.

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stephengillie
tl;dr: Focus on journeys, not destinations.

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swombat
Or perhaps, draw the right conclusion from the data: setting bad goals is
really bad. Don't set bad goals.

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hnriot
This reminds me of a Stephen Fry interview commenting on the same point.

<http://youtu.be/4byn2CIwec0>

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joshbert
I'm not. I'm setting and doing goals all year long, this year won't be any
different.

