I said yesterday that I’d be writing on some additional ideas I’ve gained from Smarter Faster Better, the new book by Charles Duhigg. Duhigg’s strength as a writer is in the stories he tells about real people and situations that illustrate his ideas. His investment of time spent gathering this information, specifically in interviews, must be enormous.
1974 because Eli Zeira, the Director of Military Intelligence, had a limited, premature goal: to be sure that alarms about invasion were only raised when the danger was real and imminent. (If you’re not up on your Israeli history you’ll have to read the book to find out exactly what happened.) Second, how General Electric, at the time the second most valuable company in America, instituted a company-wide system of goal setting that worked well sometimes but not others. These goals were described with the acronym SMART–
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timeline
Sounds great, right? Every single employee at every single plant had to write out a memo each year outlining his or her goals and submit it to the manager, who then had to submit SMART goals to the next level manager, and so on up the chain. If the memo didn’t meet the criteria it was rejected and had to be re-submitted. So everyone spent lots of time writing up these memos. And it worked . . . most of the time. As Gary Latham, one of the psychologists who developed the SMART goal system said, “Making yourself break a goal into its SMART components is the difference between hoping something comes true and figuring out how to do it” (p. 118 of the hardback edition). But some plants were still struggling, and when consultants visited the plants to find out why, they discovered that there was some Eli-Zeira-like thinking going on. One administrative assistant, for example, had an elaborate chart outlining her SMART goals concerning how she would order the factory’s office supplies. Huh? Just do it, lady! You don’t need a chart with checkboxes to order staplers! I will allow myself one more direct quotation from the book: “Workers spent hours making sure their objectives satisfied every SMART criterion, but spent much less time making sure the goals were worth pursuing in the first place” (119).
So GE ‘s management realized that these short-term, limited goals weren’t enough. They also needed to pursue more audacious ones, called “stretch goals.” GE’s CEO Jack Welch heard a story about how the head of the Japanese railway system challenged the nation’s finest engineers to build a train that could go 120 miles an hour, a so-called “bullet train.” They succeeded, but only because they examined and improved every single aspect of the rails, the cars, the engines, and the route, each small innovation making the trains able to go just a little bit faster. So Welch decided that GE needed some stretch goals of its own. He gave the airplane engines division the goal of reducing defects by 70 percent, and they had three years to do it. In order to meet the goal the division had to change just about everything about how the engines were manufactured, from the hiring process to the work schedules. In 1999 the defect rate had fallen by 75 percent.
But here’s the thing: You have to have SMART goals and stretch goals. You can’t just have a to-do list of stretch goals, because then you’ll just be discouraged or panicked. A list of only SMART goals, on the other hand, tends to lead to complacency. “I checked everything off the list. I’m good.” Does all of the foregoing have a certain ring of familiarity? The old “how to eat an elephant” proverb? (“One bite at a time,” in case you’ve never heard.) Yes, there is truly nothing new under the sun. I think the key insight in the chapter, though, is the distinction between types of goals. I would call them “over-arching” and “achievable today” goals—OA and AT, perhaps? I have some OA goals for this blog, this website, and my book. But they’re still pretty inchoate. (Isn’t that a great word?) So let me instead describe a goal I had at one point and never reached because I never set AT goals: writing up all the stories that I told in my world history classes when I was a high school teacher. I’m like Duhigg: I love stories, and I’m good at telling them. Over the years I spent teaching eighth and ninth graders I read and read, gathering up anecdotes that I hoped would hold their attention, and I have to say that I was pretty successful. It was interesting to see how well behaved my ninth-grade history class was and how much I struggled with that same group when I taught them English, especially grammar and composition, a subject that did not lend itself to storytelling.
So when I got married and took some time off from teaching, I had the vague thought that I could compile all my stories and perhaps sell the result to a curriculum company. But there was never a day when I said to myself, ‘Today I will write out three historical anecdotes, giving whatever sources I can remember.’ It never happened. And neither did the book. I think it would have been a great tool for new teachers to have a source they could use to fall back on as they built their own classes. I think I could have sold the material. But I just looked at the elephant and sighed. I never took a bite.
Well, I need to get going on the AT goals. What’s your elephant? And how will you eat it?