Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) by Peg Streep

Author:Peg Streep
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2013-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

Remember the Pinto

So, is setting the bar high for yourself a good strategy? According to Ordóñez and the other folks who wrote the deliciously titled “Goals Gone Wild,” not necessarily.

Perhaps “Remember the Pinto” doesn’t quite have the staying power of “Remember the Maine” as a call to arms, but it’s one of the best examples that Ordóñez and her coauthors present. (Their paper predates the financial meltdown of 2008–2009, so they didn’t have the skinny on the subprime mortgage debacle and the goals set by banks to draw on, but they do mention a precursor, the collapse of the Continental Illinois Bank.)

Anyway, the short and long of the Pinto story is this: In the late 1960s, Lee Iacocca, the legendary and flamboyant best-selling author, president of Ford, and marketing guru, was concerned by foreign competition. He announced that the company would produce a new car that would cost less than $2,000 and weigh under two thousand pounds and, moreover, that the Pinto would be ready for the market pronto. The company went into overdrive (forgive the pun) to deliver on its promise. Alas, the pressures of both the goal and its timing essentially forced managers to take shortcuts to get the car out there. Among the things cut were safety checks, and it turned out that these shortcuts yielded a not-so-tiny problem: The Pinto had a tendency to catch fire in an accident. But the executives didn’t stop and redesign; with Iacocca’s goal still firmly in mind, they did the math and figured that whatever it might cost to settle lawsuits about the car’s deficiencies would be outweighed by the number of cars they could sell and, of course, the achievement of the goal Iacocca had set.

The Pinto is only one of several examples that lead the authors to caution against the “high bar” goal. The narrowness of focus induced by a single difficult goal not only encourages people to take shortcuts like those Ford’s executives took but also facilitates lying and cheating, all in the name of achieving the goal. Interestingly, one of the article’s examples is the disastrous and tragic failed Mount Everest expedition, which became the subject matter of Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air. In that case, the team leaders, who were the experienced climbers, so identified with their clients’ goal to reach the summit that like the Ford executives, their focus overrode their caution and judgment.

How the setting of a time limit for achievement affects human behavior is amplified by other examples beyond the Pinto; similarly, goals that are simply too challenging also encourage unacceptable amounts of risk taking, as does setting too many goals at once. Finally, stringent goal setting undermines intrinsic motivation in a business setting. These are, the authors assert, the very predictable consequences of setting high performance goals. In fairness, we must add that the rejoinder to “Goals Gone Wild” was published by Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, who criticized the authors’ use of anecdote.

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