Can You Count?

Posted by Joseph Ansanelli on Mar 9, 2009 in Execution, Startups | 1 comment

Good execution is a corner stone for success. The following post is a little execution test.  Let’s see how good you are at the simple task of counting

Your goal is to count how many times the team in white passes the ball.  It’s going to get complicated so keep an eye on the white team.  Click the video and start counting.

Now scroll down to read more once you’ve watched and help me answer the question, if you “can count”?

How many of you saw  “it”?  I’ll admit it. I missed it.

As I have previously written in “If you don’t know where you are going, well, you’re lost“, it is important to set goals, but as the video shows, the goal of counting may have caused something important to be missed.

Some recent academic articles, “Enhancing the Benefits and Overcoming the Pitfalls of Goal Setting” (Full PDF) and “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal-Setting” (Summary and Full PDF) generally support the view that good goal setting increases performance.  Yet, they also raise some great points about managing and avoiding pitfalls in the use of goals.

Importance of Goals
This post is not designed to say that goal setting is bad (even though the authors of Goals Gone Wild suggest that they are very overused).  I propose that setting goals are key to long term success and not just for entrepreneurs and startups, but for any organization.  It is generally true that setting good (and hard) goals for an individual or team is directly related to the performance towards and achievement of the goal.   So what makes a good goal?

Without re-writing my previous post on goal setting, a quick summary is that you should have 3-5 “Wildly Important Goals” for a team or an individual.  These goals should be aspirational to give the team a vision in which to believe, yet specific enough to support concrete strategies for how to achieve them.  Lastly, there should measurable and time bound objectives to gauge success of achievement.

Like anything, though, the process of goal setting is not perfect and has some potential pitfalls.

“Goals Gone Wild”
President Kennedy’s 1961 speech to land a man on the moon before the end of a decade is a great example of a very aspirational goal that electrified a nation to succeed.  There are however a number of goals that led to disasters.  As highlighted in “Goals Gone Wild”, in late 1968 or early 1969, Lee Iaccoca set a goal for Ford to make a new car that would be “under 2000 pounds and under $2,000” and available by 1970.  Horrifically, the resulting Pinto was unsafe, a market failure and led to the death of 53 people.  So what are some of the risks leading to “goals going wild”?

1. Blindness
2. People
3. Being absolutely wrong
4. Success
5. Lather, rinse repeat

Blindness
As demonstrated by our friendly moon walking bear, a risk to goal setting is blindness.  While used as a cycling safety add, the video is based on research from the 1970′s by Ulrich Neisser, PhD at Cornell and followed up in 1999 by Harvard psychologists, Daniel Simons, PhD and Christopher Chabris, PhD.  The point in this post is that it’s important when setting a goal that organizations do not become blind to either other more important goals or blind to negative consequences of the goal.  As mentioned with the goal for the Ford Pinto, the goals led the organization to not adhere, or worse, ignore, strict safety and quality tests with deadly results.  Other examples of goal setting can even lead to unethical and illegal activity as has been witnessed in the current financial crisis, Enron, and others.  It is important for leaders and everyone on the team to keep one eye on the goal without losing sight of the big picture and of course the law.

People
Another of the biggest risks in setting goals, is that all too often the organization does not have the right people (or any people for that matter) or the tools and resources to achieve the goal. When setting a goal, a leader’s first job is to make sure that the required resources are made available to the team.  This includes the ability to hire (and fire!) the needed team, dollars needed for investments including training for the team, and access to any other tools to achieve the goal.  If you don’t have the right people, or a plan to build the right team, a goal is doomed from the start.

Absolutely Wrong
Additionally sometimes the goal may not have the right measure of success.  While more of a fan of Milton Friedman than John Maynard Keynes, I think Keynes had a point when he said that it’s better to be roughly right than absolutely wrong.  For example, at Vontu we had been growing our sales at triple digit percentages for our first few years.  As the law of large numbers set in, we planned one year to grow 70% based on rough estimates that the market would be growing somewhere between 50-100%.  We ended up growing more than 50% and maintained dominant market leadership yet missed our goal and many people felt we failed.  It turned out that we maintained our competitive win rate and achieved an even greater market share in our target markets.  Yet, an unintended consequence is that people felt we had failed, yet in many ways we were very successful.

Managing failure is a balancing act as encouraging good risk taking and the failure is important for the evolution of an organization and its long term success.  On one hand the goal is designed to set a minimum bar to achieve yet you want to encourage, if not even celebrate good risk taking and failure in efforts to achieve success.  In success we tend to celebrate, yet it is through failure that we reflect and learn.  And sometimes not achieving the exact goal is still success.

Success kills motivation
Another challenge and unintended consequence is that achievement of goals often leads to new, more challenging and potentially unattainable goals.  A great example is a successful sales person.  Typically a sales person is given an annual sales quota and increasing bonuses for overachieving on the quota.  If a sales rep has a spectacular year, then it’s pretty likely that their following year’s quota will be higher.  It’s important to not base goals solely on past performance but what’s realistic given the current and expected future situation.  Do not create goals which give people a sense of being on the treadmill constantly being sped up with additional success as one day, they just might jump off it.

Lather, Rinse and Repeat
An often cited issue of strict goal setting is that there is little room for innovation, risk taking or learning.  This is a problem as sometimes once a strategy works, it is often re-applied to similar goals such as achieving sales targets year after year.  What works at one stage of the market, might not work for a future or different stage.  As an example, when establishing a new market, the initial marketing strategy will be very evangelistic and target early adopters and influencers yet as the market grows, the strategy will need to evolve to maybe focus more on a reference selling model or to expand into new geographies or market segments.

Additionally, as referenced in Latham and Locke’s article on avoiding the pitfalls of goal setting, sometimes a goal needs to simply be to invest or learn something new.  For example, when targeting a new market, the goal might not be market share, leadership or even a dollar amount.  It might simply be to understand if the market is a good one to target in the following year.  Or it might be to release a prototype and see the reaction.   Innovation, risk taking, and trial and error can be goals in and of themselves.

Success Gone Wild
In summary, these are just a few of the things to watch out for in goal setting.  The articles cover a number of others.  Yet while there are risks to goal setting, it’s ultimately a question of leadership and in properly managing the goals so you don’t miss the moonwalking bear.

I am a firm believer in the power of goals to help a leader and teams achieve wild success.

As I wrote, “If you don’t know where you are going, well, you’re lost.”

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