
Why setting goals can backfire - robg
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/15/ready_aim____fail/?page=full
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JunkDNA
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.

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ssanders82
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...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-sins-of-
commissions.html)

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dextrocardia
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.

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

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Tamerlin
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.

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padmanabhan01
Is this not about setting the wrong goal, as against setting a goal itself?

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

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gojomo
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>

