GOAL SETTING

Smart Goals, Stretch Goals, and the Yom Kippur War

In October 1972, one of Israel’s brightest generals, the forty-four-year-old Eli Zeira, was promoted to oversee the Directorate of Military Intelligence, the agency responsible for warning the country’s leaders if its enemies were about to attack.

Zeira’s appointment came half a decade after the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel, in a stunning preemptive strike, had captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and other territory from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. That war had demonstrated Israel’s military superiority, more than doubled the amount of territory the country controlled, and had humiliated the nation’s enemies. But it also instilled a deep anxiety among Israeli citizens that the country’s antagonists would eventually seek revenge.

Those fears were legitimate. Since the Six-Day War had ended, generals in Egypt and Syria had repeatedly threatened to reclaim their lost territory, and Arab leaders, in fiery speeches, had vowed to push the Jewish state into the sea. As Israel’s enemies became increasingly bellicose, the nation’s lawmakers sought to calm public worries by asking the military to provide regular forecasts on the likelihood of attack.

However, the assessments provided by the Directorate of Military Intelligence were often contradictory and inconclusive, a mishmash of opinions predicting various levels of risk. Analysts sent conflicting memos and flip-flopped week to week. Some weeks, lawmakers were warned to be on alert, and then nothing would happen. Policy makers were called to meetings and told that a risk might be materializing, but no one could say for sure. Army units were ordered to ready their defenses, and then those orders would be countermanded with no explanation why.

As a result, Israeli politicians and the public became increasingly frustrated. Army reservists constituted 80 percent of the Israeli Defense Forces’ ground troops. There was a constant nervousness that hundreds of thousands of citizens would be required, at a moment’s notice, to abandon their families and rush to the borders. People wanted to know if the risk of another war was real and, if so, how much forewarning they would get.

Eli Zeira was appointed to head the Directorate of Military Intelligence, in part, to address those uncertainties. He was a former paratrooper known for his sophistication and political savvy. He had risen quickly through Israel’s military establishment, even spending a few years as an assistant to Moshe Dayan, the hero of the Six-Day War. When Zeira took over the Directorate, he told the Israeli parliament that his job was simple: to provide decision makers with an “estimate as clear and as sharp as possible.” His chief goal, he said, was to make sure alarms were raised only when the risks of war were real.

His method for achieving this clarity was ordering his military analysts to use a strict formula in assessing Arab intentions. He had helped develop these criteria, which became known among intelligence officials as “the concept.” Zeira argued that during the Six-Day War, Israel’s superior airpower, arsenal of long-range missiles, and battlefield dominance had so thoroughly embarrassed their enemies that no country would attack again unless they had an air force powerful enough to protect ground troops from Israeli jets, and Scud missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv. Without those two conditions being met, Zeira said, the threats of Arab leaders were nothing more than words.

Six months after Zeira assumed his post, the nation had an opportunity to test his concept. In the spring of 1973, large numbers of Egyptian troops began amassing along the Suez Canal, which was the border between Egypt and the Israeli-controlled Sinai Peninsula. Israel’s spies warned that Egypt planned to invade in mid-May.

On April 18, Israel’s prime minister, Golda Meir, gathered her top advisers in a closed-door meeting. The military chief of staff and the head of the Mossad both said an Egyptian attack was a real possibility and the nation needed to prepare.

Meir turned to Zeira for his assessment. He disagreed with his colleagues, he said. Egypt still didn’t have a powerful air force and possessed no missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv. Egypt’s leaders were merely rattling sabers to impress their countrymen. The odds of an invasion, he determined, were “very low.”

Meir ultimately sided with her chief of staff and the Mossad. She ordered the military to make defensive preparations and, over the next month, the army readied itself for war. Soldiers built walls, outposts, and batteries along the hundred-mile-long bank of the Suez Canal. In the Golan Heights, which bordered Syria, platoons launched practice shells and tanks rehearsed battle formations. Millions of dollars were spent and thousands of soldiers were prevented from taking leave. But the attack never materialized. Meir’s government, chagrined at their overreaction, soon reversed their public declarations. In July of that year, Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s defense minister, told Time magazine that it was unlikely a war would occur within the next decade. Zeira emerged from the affair, in the words of the historian Abraham Rabinovich, “with his reputation, and his self-confidence, greatly enhanced.

“With alarm bells going off all around him and the nation’s fate at stake, he had coolly maintained throughout the crisis that the probability of war was not only low, but ‘very low,’ ” Rabinovich wrote. “It was [his] task, he would say, to keep the national blood pressure down and not sound alarms unnecessarily. Otherwise, the reserves would be mobilized every couple of months with devastating effect on the economy and on morale.”

By the summer of 1973, Zeira had established himself as one of Israel’s most influential leaders. He had assumed his new job with the goal of reducing needless anxiety, and had demonstrated that a disciplined approach could prevent wasteful second-guessing. The nation had wanted relief from the constant worries of an impending attack, and Zeira had provided it. His ascent to even more powerful positions seemed preordained.

II.

Imagine you have been asked to complete a questionnaire. Your assignment is to rate how strongly you agree or disagree with forty-two statements, including:

I believe orderliness and organization are among the most important characteristics.

I find that establishing a consistent routine enables me to enjoy life more.

I like to have friends who are unpredictable.

I prefer interacting with people whose opinions are very different from my own.

My personal space is usually messy and disorganized.

It’s annoying to listen to someone who cannot seem to make up his or her mind.

A team of researchers at the University of Maryland first published this test in 1994, and since then it has become a staple of personality exams. At first glance, the questions seem designed to measure someone’s preference for personal organization and their comfort with alternate viewpoints. And, in fact, researchers have found that this exam helps identify people who are more decisive and self-assured, and that those traits are correlated with general success in life. Determined and focused people tend to work harder and get tasks done more promptly. They stay married longer and have deeper networks of friends. They often have higher-paying jobs.

But this questionnaire is not intended to test personal organization. Rather, it’s designed to measure a personality trait known as “the need for cognitive closure,” which psychologists define as “the desire for a confident judgment on an issue, any confident judgment, as compared to confusion and ambiguity.” Most people respond to this exam—which is called “the need for closure scale”—by demonstrating a preference for a mix of order and chaos in their lives. They say they prize orderliness but admit to having messy desks. They say they are annoyed by indecision but also have unreliable friends. However, some people—about 20 percent of test takers, and many of the most accomplished people who have completed the exam—show a higher-than-average preference for personal organization, decisiveness, and predictability. They tend to disdain flighty friends and ambiguous situations. These people have a high emotional need for cognitive closure.

The need for cognitive closure, in many settings, can be a great strength. People who have a strong urge for closure are more likely to be self-disciplined and seen as leaders by their peers. An instinct to make a judgment and then stick with it forestalls needless second-guessing and prolonged debate. The best chess players typically display a high need for closure, which helps them focus on a specific problem during stressful moments rather than obsessing over past mistakes. All of us crave closure to some degree, and that’s good, because a basic level of personal organization is a prerequisite for success. What’s more, making a decision and moving on to the next question feels productive. It feels like progress.

But there are risks associated with a high need for closure. When people begin craving the emotional satisfaction that comes from making a decision—when they require a sensation of being productive in order to stay calm—they are more likely to make hasty decisions and less likely to reconsider an unwise choice. The “need for closure introduces a bias into the judgmental process,” a team of researchers wrote in Political Psychology in 2003. A high need for closure has been shown to trigger close-mindedness, authoritarian impulses, and a preference for conflict over cooperation. Individuals with a high need for closure “may display considerable cognitive impatience or impulsivity: They may ‘leap’ to judgment on the basis of inconclusive evidence and exhibit rigidity of thought and reluctance to entertain views different from their own,” the authors of the need for closure scale, Arie Kruglanski and Donna Webster, wrote in 1996.

Put differently, an instinct for decisiveness is great—until it’s not. When people rush toward decisions simply because it makes them feel like they are getting something done, missteps are more likely to occur.

Researchers describe the need for closure as having multiple components. There is the need to “seize” a goal, as well as a separate urge to “freeze” on an objective once it has been selected. Decisive people have an instinct to “seize” on a choice when it meets a minimum threshold of acceptability. This is a useful impulse, because it helps us commit to projects rather than endlessly debating questions or second-guessing ourselves into a state of paralysis.

However, if our urge for closure is too strong, we “freeze” on our goals and yearn to grab that feeling of productivity at the expense of common sense. “Individuals with a high need for cognitive closure may deny, reinterpret or suppress information inconsistent with the preconceptions on which they are ‘frozen,’ ” the Political Psychology researchers wrote. When we’re overly focused on feeling productive, we become blind to details that should give us pause.

It feels good to achieve closure. Sometimes, though, we become unwilling to sacrifice that sensation even when it’s clear we’re making a mistake.

On October 1, 1973, six months after Zeira predicted that the odds of war were “very low”—and five days before Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar—a young Israeli intelligence officer named Binyamin Siman-Tov sent his commanders in Tel Aviv a warning: He was receiving reports from the Sinai that large numbers of Egyptian convoys were arriving at night. Egypt’s military was digging up minefields they had installed along the border, making it easier for them to move material across the canal. There were stockpiles of boats and bridge-making supplies on the Egyptian side of the border. It was the largest buildup of equipment that soldiers on the front lines had seen.

Zeira had received a number of reports like this in the preceding week, but they didn’t cause him much concern. Remember the concept, he counseled his lieutenants: Egypt still didn’t have enough planes or missiles to defeat Israel. And besides, Zeira had other things to focus on, most notably the cultural transformation he was pushing through the Directorate of Military Intelligence. In the midst of remaking the military’s approach to threat analysis, Zeira was also ridding his agency of its propensity for endless debate. Henceforth, he had declared, intelligence officers would be evaluated on the clarity of their recommendations. Both Zeira and his chief lieutenant “lacked the patience for long and open discussions and regarded them as ‘bullshit,’ ” the historians Uri Bar-Joseph and Abraham Rabinovich wrote. Zeira would “humiliate officers who, in his opinion, came unprepared for meetings. At least once he was heard to say that those officers who estimated in spring 1973 that a war was likely should not expect promotion.” Though internal debates were tolerated to a point, “once an estimate was formulated everyone was committed to it and no one was allowed to express a different estimate outside the organization.”

The Directorate had to lead by example, Zeira declared. He had been appointed to provide answers, not prolong debates. When one of Zeira’s subordinates, concerned about the latest reports of Egyptian troop movements, asked to mobilize a handful of reservists to help analyze what was going on, he received a phone call. “Yoel, listen well,” Zeira told the memo writer. “It is intelligence’s job to safeguard the nation’s nerves, not to drive the public crazy.” The request was denied.

On October 2 and 3, 1973, sightings of Egyptian troops increased. Then came word of activity on the border with Syria. Alarmed, the prime minister called another meeting. Zeira’s division, once again, counseled that there was no reason to be concerned: Egypt and Syria had weak air forces; they had no missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv. This time, the military experts who had disagreed with Zeira six months earlier followed his lead. “I don’t see a concrete danger in the near future,” one general told the prime minister. Meir was troubled before the meeting, she later recounted in her memoirs, but the intelligence estimate eased her mind. She had chosen the right officials to bring the nation much-needed relief.

Seventy-two hours after Binyamin Siman-Tov submitted his report, Israel’s intelligence analysts learned that the Soviet Union had started an emergency airlift of Soviet advisers and their families out of Syria and Egypt. Intercepted telephone calls among Russian families revealed they had been ordered to hurry to the airport. Aerial photographs showed more tanks, artillery, and air-defense guns massing along the Suez Canal and in the Syrian-controlled portions of the Golan Heights.

On the morning of Friday, October 5, four days after Siman-Tov’s report, a group of Israel’s top military commanders, including Zeira, gathered in the office of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. The hero of the Six-Day War was upset. The Egyptians had positioned 1,100 pieces of artillery along the Suez, and air reconnaissance showed massive numbers of troops. “You people don’t take the Arabs seriously enough,” Dayan said. The chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces agreed. Earlier that morning he had ordered the army to its highest alert since 1967.

But Zeira had another explanation for the troop movements: The Egyptians were preparing their defenses in case Israel launched an invasion of its own. There were no new fighter jets in Egypt, he said. No Scud missiles. Arab leaders knew striking at Israel would be suicide. “I don’t see either the Egyptians or the Syrians attacking,” Zeira said.

Afterward, the meeting moved into the prime minister’s office. She asked for an update. The military’s chief of staff, aware that mobilizing Israel’s reservists on the holiest Jewish holiday would draw fierce criticism, said, “I still think that they’re not going to attack, but we have no hard information.”

Then Zeira spoke. Concerns about the Egyptians and Syrians attacking, he said, were “absolutely unreasonable.” He even had a logical reason for the evacuation of Soviet advisers. “Maybe the Russians think the Arabs are going to attack because they don’t understand them well,” he said, but the Israelis knew their neighbors better than that. Later that day, when Israeli generals briefed the prime minister’s cabinet, Zeira reiterated that he believed there was a “low probability” of war. What they were seeing were defensive preparations or a military exercise, Zeira argued. Arab leaders weren’t irrational.

Having seized on an answer—that Egypt and Syria knew they couldn’t win, and therefore wouldn’t attack—Zeira was frozen, unwilling to reconsider the question. His goal of disciplined decision making had been satisfied.

The next morning was the first full day of Yom Kippur.

Before daybreak, the head of the Mossad telephoned his colleagues to say that a well-connected source had told him Egypt would invade by nightfall. The message was delivered to the prime minister as well as Dayan and the military’s chief of staff. They all rushed to their offices as the sun rose. The odds of war, they believed, had just shifted.

As Yom Kippur prayers began, Israel’s streets were quiet. Families were gathered in homes and synagogues. Shortly after ten o’clock, a full six days after enemy forces had started massing along Israeli borders, the military finally issued a partial call-up of reserves. Inside houses of worship, rabbis read hastily delivered lists with the names of people who needed to report for duty. By then, Egypt and Syria had been moving tanks and artillery into offensive range for weeks, but this was the first public hint that trouble might be near. At that moment, there were more than 150,000 enemy soldiers along Israel’s borders, ready to attack from two directions, and another half million soldiers waiting to follow the initial waves. Egypt and Syria had been coordinating their invasion plans for months. When confidential documents from that period were released decades later, they revealed that Egypt s president had assumed Israel knew what he was doing. How else could they interpret all the men and matériel being moved to the border?

Meir called an emergency meeting of her cabinet for noon. “She was pale and her eyes were downcast,” The Times of Israel wrote in a reconstruction of that day. “Her hair, normally neatly combed and pulled back, was disheveled and she looked like she had not shut her eyes all night….She began with a detailed report of events over the past few days the Arab deployment on the borders that had suddenly taken on ominous color, the hasty evacuation of the families of Soviet advisers from Egypt and Syria, the air photos, the insistence by military intelligence that there would be no war despite mounting evidence to the contrary.” Meir announced her conclusion: An invasion of Israel was likely to occur, maybe as soon as within the next six hours.

“The ministers were stunned,” The Times of Israel reported. “They had not been made privy to the Arab buildup. Furthermore, they had been told for years that even in a worst-case situation, military intelligence would provide at least a 48-hour warning to call up the reserves before war broke out.” Now they were being informed that a two-front war would occur in less than six hours. The reserves were only partially mobilized—and because of the holiday, it was unclear how quickly troops would be able to get to the front.

The attack came even sooner than Meir expected. Two hours after the cabinet meeting started, the first of ten thousand Egyptian shells began falling on the Sinai; at four P.M., twenty-three thousand Egyptian soldiers crossed the Suez in the first wave of attack. By the end of the day, enemy forces were two miles into Israeli territory. They had killed five hundred Israeli soldiers and were rapidly advancing toward the Israeli towns of Yamit and Avshalom, as well as an Israeli air force base. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Syria struck simultaneously, attacking the Golan Heights with soldiers, planes, and tanks.

Over the next twenty-four hours, Egypt and Syria pushed deeper into the Sinai and the Golan as Israel scrambled to respond. Over a hundred thousand enemy troops were inside Israel’s territory. It took three days to halt the Egyptian advance, and two days to organize a counterstrike against Syria. Eventually, Israel’s superior firepower asserted itself. Israeli soldiers drove the Syrian army back toward the border, forcing the retreating army to leave behind 1,000 of its 1,500 tanks. A few days later, Israeli Defense Forces began shelling the outskirts of Damascus.

Then Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, hoping to take more territory in the Sinai, launched a risky offensive to capture two strategic passes deep inside the peninsula. The gamble failed. Israeli forces pushed the Egyptians backward. On October 15, nine days after Egypt invaded, Israel crossed the Suez Canal and began taking Egyptian land. Within the week, Egypt’s Third Army, located along the banks of the Suez, was encircled, cut off by the Israelis from supplies and reinforcements. The Second Army, in the north, was almost completely surrounded as well. In the face of defeat, President Sadat demanded a cease-fire, and American and Soviet leaders pressured Israel to agree. Fighting stopped in late October, and the war formally ended on January 18, 1974. Israel had repelled the invasion, but at a huge cost. More than ten thousand Israelis were killed or wounded. As many as thirty thousand Egyptians and Syrians are estimated to have died.

“Something of ours was destroyed on Yom Kippur last year,” an Israeli newspaper wrote on the first anniversary of the war. “The state was saved, true, but our faith was fractured, our trust damaged, our hearts deeply gouged, and an entire generation was nearly lost.”

“Even a quarter century later the Yom Kippur war remains the most traumatic phase in Israel’s history,” the historian P. R. Kumaraswamy wrote. Today, the psychological scars of the invasion are still profound.

Zeira had set out with a goal of alleviating public anxiety, and the government had followed his lead. But in their eagerness to provide confident answers, to make decisive judgments and avoid ambiguity, those leaders had almost cost Israel its life.

III.

Fifteen years later and half a world away, General Electric, one of the largest companies on earth, was thinking about very different kinds of goals when executives contacted an organizational psychologist from the University of Southern California and asked him for help figuring out why some factories had gone awry.

It was the late 1980s and GE was the second most valuable company in America, just behind Exxon. GE manufactured everything from lightbulbs to jet engines, refrigerators to railway cars, and through its ownership of NBC, was in millions of homes with iconic shows such as Cheers, The Cosby Show, and L.A. Law. The company employed over 220,000 people, more than many U.S. cities had residents. One of the reasons GE was so successful, its executives boasted, was that it was so good at choosing goals.

In the 1940s, GE had formalized a corporate goal-setting system that would eventually become a model around the world. By the 1960s, every GE employee was required to write out their objectives for the year in a letter to their manager. “Simply put,” historians at Harvard Business School wrote in 2011, “the manager’s letter required a job holder to write a letter to his or her superior indicating what the goals for the next time frame were, how the goals would be met, and what standards were to be expected. When the superior accepted this letter—usually after editing and discussion—it became the work ‘contract.’ ”

By the 1980s, this system had evolved into a system of so-called SMART goals that every division and manager were expected to describe each quarter. These objectives had to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and based on a timeline. In other words, they had to be provably within reach and described in a way that suggested a concrete plan.

If a goal didn’t meet the SMART criteria, a manager had to resubmit a memo detailing their aims, again and again, until it was approved by upper management. “It was about getting concrete,” said William Conaty, who retired as GE’s head of human resources in 2007. “Your manager was always saying, what’s the specifics? What’s the timeline? Prove to me this is realistic. The system worked because by the time we were done, you knew pretty clearly how things were going to unfold.”

The SMART mindset spread throughout GE’s culture. There were SMART charts to help midlevel managers describe monthly goals and SMART worksheets to turn personal objectives into action plans. And the company’s belief that SMART goals would work was rooted in good science.

In the 1970s, a pair of university psychologists named Edwin Locke and Gary Latham had helped develop the SMART criteria through experiments scrutinizing the best way to set goals. In one experiment Latham conducted in 1975, researchers approached forty-five of the most experienced and productive typists at a large corporation and measured how fast they produced text. The typists knew they were among the best in the company, but they had never measured how quickly they typed. The researchers found that, on average, each worker produced ninety-five lines of typewritten output per hour.

Then the researchers gave each typist a specific goal based on their previous performance—such as ninety-eight lines per hour—and showed the typists a system for easily measuring their hourly output. The researchers also had a conversation with each typist to make sure the goal was realistic—and to adjust it if necessary—and they discussed what changes were required to make the objective achievable. They came up with a timeline for each person. The conversation didn’t take long—say, fifteen minutes per person—but afterward each typist knew exactly what to do and how to measure success. Each of them, put differently, had a SMART goal.

Some of the researchers’ colleagues said they didn’t believe this would have an impact on the typists’ performance. All the typists were professionals with years of experience. A fifteen-minute conversation should not make much of a difference to someone who has been typing eight hours a day for two decades.

But one week later, when the researchers measured typing speeds again, they found that the workers, on average, were completing 103 lines per hour. Another week later: 112 lines. Most of the typists had blown past the goals they had set. The researchers worried the workers were just trying to impress them, so they came back again, three months later, and quietly measured everyone’s performance once more. They were typing just as fast, and some had gotten even faster.

“Some 400 laboratory and field studies [show] that specific, high goals lead to a higher level of task performance than do easy goals or vague, abstract goals such as the exhortation to ‘do one’s best,’ ” Locke and Latham wrote in 2006 in a review of goal-setting studies. In particular, objectives like SMART goals often unlock a potential that people don’t even realize they possess. The reason, in part, is because goal-setting processes like the SMART system force people to translate vague aspirations into concrete plans. The process of making a goal specific and proving it is achievable involves figuring out the steps it requires—or shifting that goal slightly, if your initial aims turn out to be unrealistic. Coming up with a timeline and a way to measure success forces a discipline onto the process that good intentions can’t match.

“Making yourself break a goal into its SMART components is the difference between hoping something comes true and figuring out how to do it,” Latham told me.

GE’s chief executive Jack Welch had long claimed that his insistence on SMART goals was one of the reasons the company’s stock had more than tripled in eight years. But forcing people to detail their goals with such specificity didn’t mean every part of the company ran smoothly. Some divisions, despite setting SMART goals, never seemed to excel—or they would flip-flop from profits to losses, or seem to be growing and then suddenly fall apart. In the late 1980s, executives became particularly concerned about two divisions—a nuclear equipment manufacturer in North Carolina and a jet engine plant in Massachusetts—that had once been among the company’s top performers but were now limping along.

Executives initially suspected those divisions simply needed better-defined objectives, so factory managers were asked to prepare memo after memo describing increasingly specific goals. Their responses were detailed, precise, and realistic. They met every SMART criterion.

And yet, profits still fell.

So a group of GE’s internal consultants visited the nuclear factory in Wilmington, North Carolina. They asked employees to walk them through their weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals. One plant executive explained that his SMART objective was to prevent antinuclear protesters from harassing workers as they entered the plant, because he felt it eroded morale. He had come up with a SMART plan to build a fence. The goal was specific and reasonable (the fence would be fifty feet long and nine feet high), it had a timeline (it would be done by February), and it was achievable (they had a contractor ready to go).

Next, the consultants went to the jet engine factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, and interviewed, among others, an administrative assistant who told them her SMART goal was ordering the factory’s office supplies. She showed them a SMART chart with specific aims (“order staplers, pens and desk calendars”) that were measurable (“by June”), as well as achievable, realistic, and had a timeline (“Place order on February 1. Request update on March 15.”).

Many of the SMART goals the consultants found inside the factories were just as detailed—and just as trivial. 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. The nuclear factory’s security guards had written extensive memos on the goal of theft prevention and had come up with a plan that “basically consisted of searching everyone’s bags every time they entered or exited the plant, which caused huge delays,” said Brian Butler, one of the consultants. “It might have stopped thefts, but it also destroyed the factory’s productivity because everyone started leaving earlier each day so they could get home at a decent hour.” Even the plants’ senior executives, the consultants found, had fallen prey to an obsession with achievable but inconsequential goals, and were focused on unimportant short-term objectives rather than more ambitious plans.

When the consultants asked employees how they felt about GE’s emphasis on SMART goals, they expected to hear complaints about the onerous bureaucracy. They anticipated people would say they wanted to think bigger, but were hamstrung by the incessant SMART demands. Instead, employees said they loved the SMART system. The administrative assistant who ordered office supplies said fulfilling those goals gave her a real sense of accomplishment. Sometimes, she said, she would write a SMART memo for a task she had already completed and then put it into her “Done” folder. It made her feel so good.

Researchers who have studied SMART goals and other structured methods of choosing objectives say this isn’t unusual. Such systems, though useful, can sometimes trigger our need for closure in counterproductive ways. Aims such as SMART goals “can cause [a] person to have tunnel vision, to focus more on expanding effort to get immediate results,” Locke and Latham wrote in 1990. Experiments have shown that people with SMART goals are more likely to seize on the easiest tasks, to become obsessed with finishing projects, and to freeze on priorities once a goal has been set. “You get into this mindset where crossing things off your to-do list becomes more important than asking yourself if you’re doing the right things,” said Latham.

GE’s executives weren’t sure how to help the nuclear and jet engine factories. So in 1989, they asked a professor named Steve Kerr, the dean of faculty at the University of Southern California business school, for help. Kerr was an expert in the psychology of goal setting, and he began by interviewing employees inside the nuclear factory. “A lot of these people were really demoralized,” he said. “They had gone into nuclear energy because they wanted to change the world. Then Three Mile Island and Chernobyl happened, and the industry was getting protested every day and completely brutalized in the press.” Setting short-term goals and achieving them, the plant’s workers and executives told Kerr, was one of the few things they could feel good about at work.

The only way to improve performance at the nuclear factory, Kerr thought, was to find a way to shake people out of their focus on short-term objectives. GE had recently started a series of meetings among top executives called “Work-Outs” that were designed to encourage people to think about bigger ambitions and more long-term plans. Kerr helped expand those meetings to factories’ rank-and-file.

The rules at Work-Outs were simple: Employees could suggest any goal they thought GE ought to be pursuing. There were no SMART charts or memos. “The concept was that nothing was off-limits,” Kerr told me. Managers had to approve or deny each suggestion quickly, often right away, and “we wanted to make it easy to say yes,” said Kerr. “We thought if we could get people to identify the ambition first, and then figure out the plan afterward, it would encourage bigger thinking.” If an idea seemed half-baked, Kerr said, a manager should “say yes, because even if the proposal is no better than what you’re doing now, with the group’s energy behind it, the plan will turn out great.” Only after a goal was approved would everyone begin the formal process of determining how to make it realistic and achievable and all the other SMART criteria.

At a Work-Out inside the engine factory in Massachusetts, one worker told his bosses they were making a mistake by outsourcing construction of protective shields for their grinding machines. The factory could make them in-house for half the cost, he said. Then he unfurled a piece of butcher paper covered with scribbled blueprints. There was nothing SMART about the man’s proposal. It was unclear if it was realistic or achievable, or what measurements to apply. But when the factory’s top manager looked at the butcher paper, he said, “I guess we’ll try it out.”

Four months later, after the blueprints had been professionally redrawn and the plan transformed into a series of SMART goals, the first prototype was installed. It cost $16,000—more than 80 percent less than the outsourced bid. The factory saved $200,000 that year on ideas proposed at the Work-Out. “Everybody gets caught up in this tremendous rush of adrenaline,” a team leader at the plant, Bill DiMaio, said. “The ideas that people come up with are so encouraging, it’s unbelievable. These people get psyched. All their ideas are fair game.”

Then Kerr helped take the Work-Out program company-wide. By 1994, every GE employee within GE had participated in at least one Work-Out. As profits and productivity rose, executives at other companies began imitating the Work-Out system inside their own firms. By 1995, there were hundreds of companies conducting Work-Outs. Kerr joined GE full-time in 1994 and eventually became the company’s “chief learning officer.”

“The Work-Outs were successful because they balanced the psychological influence of immediate goals with the freedom to think about bigger things,” said Kerr. “That’s critical. People respond to the conditions around them. If you’re being constantly told to focus on achievable results, you’re only going to think of achievable goals. You’re not going to dream big.”

Work-Outs, however, weren’t perfect. They took an entire day of everyone’s time and usually meant the plant had to slow down production so that workers could all attend the meetings. It was something a division or plant could do once or twice a year, at most. And though the Work-Outs left everyone feeling excited and hungry for change, the effects were frequently short-lived. A week later, everyone was back at their old jobs and, often, their old ways of thinking.

Kerr and his colleagues wanted to foster perpetual ambitions. How, they wondered, do you get people to think expansively all the time?

IV.

In 1993, twelve years after becoming chief executive of General Electric, Jack Welch traveled to Tokyo and, while touring a factory that made medical testing equipment, heard a story about Japan’s railway system.

In the 1950s, during the lingering wake of the devastation of the Second World War, Japan was intensely focused on growing the nation’s economy. A large portion of the country’s population lived in or between the cities of Tokyo and Osaka, which were separated by just 320 miles of train track. Every day, tens of thousands of people traveled between the cities. Vast amounts of raw industrial materials were transported on those rail lines. But the Japanese topography was so mountainous and the railway system so outdated that the trip could take as long as twenty hours. So, in 1955, the head of the Japanese railway system issued a challenge to the nation’s finest engineers: invent a faster train.

Six months later, a team unveiled a prototype locomotive capable of going 65 miles per hour—a speed that, at the time, made it among the fastest passenger trains in the world. Not good enough, the head of the railway system said. He wanted 120 miles per hour.

The engineers explained that was not realistic. At those speeds, if a train turned too sharply, the centrifugal force would derail the cars. Seventy miles an hour was more realistic—perhaps 75. Any faster and the trains would crash.

Why do the trains need to turn? the railway head asked.

There were numerous mountains between the cities, the engineers replied.

Why not make tunnels, then?

The labor required to tunnel through that much territory could equal the cost of rebuilding Tokyo after World War II.

Three months later, the engineers unveiled an engine capable of going 75 miles per hour. The railway chief lambasted the designs. Seventy-five miles per hour, he said, had no chance of transforming the nation. Incremental improvements would only yield incremental economic growth. The only way to overhaul the nation’s transportation system was to rebuild every aspect of how trains functioned.

Over the next two years, the engineers experimented: They designed train cars that each had their own motors. They rebuilt gears so they meshed with less friction. They discovered that their new cars were too heavy for Japan’s existing tracks, and so they reinforced the rails, which had the added bonus of increasing stability, which added another half mile per hour to cars’ speed. There were hundreds of innovations, large and small, that each made the trains a little bit faster than before.

In 1964, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, the world’s first bullet train, left Tokyo along continuously welded rails that passed through tunnels cut into Japan’s mountains. It completed its inaugural trip in three hours and fifty-eight minutes, at an average speed of 120 miles per hour. Hundreds of spectators had waited overnight to see the train arrive in Osaka. Soon other bullet trains were running to other Japanese cities, helping fuel a dizzying economic expansion. The development of the bullet train, according to a 2014 study, was critical in spurring Japan’s growth well into the 1980s. And within a decade of that innovation, the technologies developed in Japan had given birth to high-speed rail projects in France, Germany, and Australia, and had revolutionized industrial design around the world.

For Jack Welch, this story was a revelation. What GE needed, he told Kerr when he got home from Japan, was a similar outlook, an institutional commitment to audacious goals. Going forward, every executive and department, in addition to delivering specific and achievable and timely objectives, would also have to identify a stretch goal—an aim so ambitious that managers couldn’t describe, at least initially, how they would achieve it. Everyone, Welch said, had to partake in “bullet train thinking.”

In a 1993 letter to shareholders, the chief executive explained that “stretch is a concept that would have produced smirks, if not laughter, in the GE of three or four years ago, because it essentially means using dreams to set business targets—with no real idea of how to get there. If you do know how to get there—it’s not a stretch target.”

Six months after Welch’s trip to Japan, every division at GE had a stretch goal. The division manufacturing airplane engines, for instance, announced they would reduce the number of defects in finished engines by 25 percent. To be honest, the division’s managers figured they could hit that target pretty easily. Almost all the defects they found on engines were small, cosmetic issues, such as a slightly misaligned cable or unimportant scratches. Anything more serious was corrected before the engine was shipped. If they hired more quality assurance employees, managers figured, they could reduce cosmetic defects with little effort.

Welch agreed that reducing defects was a wise goal.

Then he told them to cut errors by 70 percent.

That’s ridiculous, managers said. Manufacturing engines was such a complicated affair—each one weighed five tons and had more than ten thousand parts—that there was no way they could achieve a 70 percent reduction.

They had three years, Welch said.

The division’s managers started panicking—and then began analyzing every error that had been recorded in the previous twelve months. Simply hiring more quality assurance workers, they quickly realized, wouldn’t do the trick. The only way to reduce errors by 70 percent was to make every single employee, in effect, a quality assurance auditor. Everyone had to take responsibility for catching mistakes. But most factory workers didn’t know enough about the engines to identify every small defect as it occurred. The only solution, managers decided, was a massive retraining effort.

Except that didn’t really work, either. Even after nine months of retraining, the error rate had fallen by only 50 percent. So managers started hiring workers with more technical backgrounds, the kind of people who knew what an engine ought to look like and, therefore, could more easily spot what was amiss. The GE factory manufacturing CF6 engines in Durham, North Carolina, determined that the best way to find the right employees was to hire only candidates with FAA certification in engine manufacturing. Such workers, however, were already in high demand at other plants. So to attract them, managers said employees could have more autonomy. They could schedule their own shifts and organize teams however they wanted. That required the plant to do away with centralized scheduling. Teams had to self-organize and figure out their own workflow.

Welch had given his aircraft manufacturing division a stretch goal of reducing errors by 70 percent, an objective so audacious the only way to go about it was to change nearly everything about (a) how workers were trained, (b) which workers were hired, and (c) how the factory ran. By the time they were done, the Durham plant’s managers had collapsed organizational charts, remade job duties, and overhauled how they interviewed candidates, because they needed people with better team skills and more flexible mindsets. In other words, Welch’s stretch goal set off a chain reaction that remade how engines were manufactured in ways no one had imagined. By 1999, the number of defects per engine had fallen by 75 percent and the company had gone thirty-eight months without missing a single delivery, a record. The cost of manufacturing had dropped by 10 percent every year. No SMART goal would have done that.

Numerous academic studies have examined the impact of stretch goals, and have consistently found that forcing people to commit to ambitious, seemingly out-of-reach objectives can spark outsized jumps in innovation and productivity. A 1997 study of Motorola, for instance, found that the time it took engineers to develop new products fell tenfold after the company mandated stretch goals throughout the firm. A study of 3M said stretch goals helped spur such inventions as Scotch tape and Thinsulate. Stretch goals transformed Union Pacific, Texas Instruments, and public schools in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Surveys of people who have lost large amounts of weight or have become marathon runners later in life have found that stretch goals are often integral to their success.

Stretch goals “serve as jolting events that disrupt complacency and promote new ways of thinking,” a group of researchers wrote in Academy of Management Review business journal in 2011. “By forcing a substantial elevation in collective aspirations, stretch goals can shift attention to possible new futures and perhaps spark increased energy in the organization. They thus can prompt exploratory learning through experimentation, innovation, broad search, or playfulness.”

There is an important caveat to the power of stretch goals, however. Studies show that if a stretch goal is audacious, it can spark innovation. It can also cause panic and convince people that success is impossible because the goal is too big. There is a fine line between an ambition that helps people achieve something amazing and one that crushes morale. For a stretch goal to inspire, it often needs to be paired with something like the SMART system.

The reason why we need both stretch goals and SMART goals is that audaciousness, on its own, can be terrifying. It’s often not clear how to start on a stretch goal. And so, for a stretch goal to become more than just an aspiration, we need a disciplined mindset to show us how to turn a far-off objective into a series of realistic short-term aims. People who know how to build SMART goals have often been habituated into cultures where big objectives can be broken into manageable parts, and so when they encounter seemingly outsized ambitions, they know what to do. Stretch goals, paired with SMART thinking, can help put the impossible within reach.

In one experiment conducted at Duke University, for instance, varsity athletes were asked to run around a track and, when signaled, get as close as possible to a finish line 200 meters away within ten seconds. The runners in the study all knew, simply by looking at the distance they were being asked to cover, that the goal was absurd. No person has ever run anything close to 200 meters in ten seconds. The athletes made it 59.6 meters, on average, during their sprint.

A few days later, those same participants were presented with the same task, but this time the finish line was only 100 meters away. The goal was still audacious—but it was within the realm of possibility. (Usain Bolt ran 100 meters in 9.58 seconds in 2009.) During this trial, the runners made it, on average, 63.1 meters in ten seconds—“a large difference by track and field standards,” the researchers noted.

This difference in performance was explained by the fact that the shorter distance, while still challenging, lent itself to the kind of methodical planning and mental models that experienced runners are accustomed to using. The shorter distance, in other words, allowed the runners to participate in the athletic equivalent of breaking a stretch goal into SMART components. “All runners in our sample engaged in regular workouts,” the researchers wrote, and so when confronted with running 100 meters in ten seconds, they knew how to wrestle with the task. They broke it into pieces and treated it like they would other sprints. They started strong, and paced off other runners, and then pushed themselves as hard as possible in the final seconds. But when they were confronted with running 200 meters in ten seconds, there was no practical approach. There was no way to break the problem into manageable parts. There were no SMART criteria they could apply. It was simply impossible.

Experiments at the University of Waterloo, the University of Melbourne, and elsewhere show similar results: Stretch goals can spark remarkable innovations, but only when people have a system for breaking them into concrete plans.

This lesson can extend to even the most mundane aspects of life. Take, for instance, to-do lists. “To-do lists are great if you use them correctly,” Timothy Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University, told me. “But when people say things like ‘I sometimes write down easy items I can cross off right away, because it makes me feel good,’ that’s exactly the wrong way to create a to-do list. That signals you’re using it for mood repair, rather than to become productive.”

The problem with many to-do lists is that when we write down a series of short-term objectives, we are, in effect, allowing our brains to seize on the sense of satisfaction that each task will deliver. We are encouraging our need for closure and our tendency to freeze on a goal without asking if it’s the right aim. The result is that we spend hours answering unimportant emails instead of writing a big, thoughtful memo—because it feels so satisfying to clean out our in-box.

At first glance, it might seem like the solution is creating to-do lists filled solely with stretch goals. But we all know that merely writing down grand aspirations doesn’t guarantee we will achieve them. In fact, studies show that if you’re confronted with a list of only far-reaching objectives, you’re more likely to get discouraged and turn away.

So one solution is writing to-do lists that pair stretch goals and SMART goals. Come up with a menu of your biggest ambitions. Dream big and stretch. Describe the goals that, at first glance, seem impossible, such as starting a company or running a marathon.

Then choose one aim and start breaking it into short-term, concrete steps. Ask yourself: What realistic progress can you make in the next day, week, month? How many miles can you realistically run tomorrow and over the next three weeks? What are the specific, short-term steps along the path to bigger success? What timeline makes sense? Will you open your store in six months or a year? How will you measure your progress? Within psychology, these smaller ambitions are known as “proximal goals,” and repeated studies have shown that breaking a big ambition into proximal goals makes the large objective more likely to occur.

When Pychyl writes a to-do list, for instance, he starts by putting a stretch goal—such as “conduct research that explains goal/neurology interface”—at the top of the page. Underneath comes the nitty-gritty: the small tasks that tell him precisely what to do. “Specific: Download grant application. Timeline: By tomorrow.”

“That way, I’m constantly telling myself what to do next, but I’m also reminded of my larger ambition so I don’t get stuck in the weeds of doing things simply to make myself feel good,” Pychyl said.

In short, we need stretch and SMART goals. It doesn’t matter if you call them by those names. It’s not important if your proximal goals fulfill every SMART criterion. What matters is having a large ambition and a system for figuring out how to make it into a concrete and realistic plan. Then, as you check the little things off your to-do list, you’ll move ever closer to what really matters. You’ll keep your eyes on what’s both wise and SMART.

“I had no idea how what we were doing would affect the rest of the world,” Kerr told me. GE’s embrace of SMART and stretch goals has been analyzed in academic studies and psychology textbooks; the firm’s system has been imitated throughout corporate America. “We proved you can change how people act by asking them to think about goals differently,” said Kerr. “Once you know how to do that, you can get pretty much anything done.”

V.

Twenty-seven days after fighting concluded in the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli parliament established a national committee of inquiry to examine why the nation had been so dangerously unprepared. Officials met for 140 sessions and heard testimony from fifty-eight witnesses, including Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and the head of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira.

“In the days that preceded the Yom Kippur war, the Research Division of Military Intelligence had plenty of warning indicators,” investigators concluded. There was no justification for Israel to have been caught off guard. Zeira and his colleagues had ignored obvious signs of danger. They had dissuaded other leaders from following their instincts. These mistakes were not made out of malice, investigators said, but because Zeira and his staff had become so obsessed with avoiding unnecessary panic and making firm decisions that they lost sight of their most important objective: keeping Israelis safe.

Prime Minister Meir resigned one week after the government’s report was released. Moshe Dayan, the onetime hero, was hounded by critics until his death six years later. And Zeira was relieved of his position and forced to resign from government service.

Zeira’s failings in the run-up to the Yom Kippur War illustrate one final lesson regarding how goals function and influence our psychology. He, in fact, was using both stretch and SMART goals when he convinced the nation’s leaders to ignore obvious signs of war. He had clear and grand ambitions to end the cycle of anxiety plaguing Israelis; he knew that his big aim was to stop the endless debates and second-guessing. And his methods for breaking those larger goals into smaller pieces involved finding proximal goals that were specific, measurable, achievable, and realistic, and that occurred according to a timeline. He remade his agency in a deliberate, step-by-step manner. He did everything that psychologists like Latham and Locke have said we ought to do in order to achieve both big and small goals.

Yet Zeira’s craving for closure and his intolerance for revisiting questions once they were answered are among the biggest reasons why Israel failed to anticipate the attacks. Zeira is an example of how stretch and SMART goals, on their own, sometimes aren’t enough. In addition to having audacious ambitions and plans that are thorough, we still need, occasionally, to step outside the day-to-day and consider if we’re moving toward goals that make sense. We still need to think.

On October 6, 2013, the fortieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Eli Zeira addressed an audience of national security scholars in Tel Aviv. He was eighty-five years old and his gait was a bit unsteady as he walked onto the stage. He spoke haltingly from handwritten notes. He had come to defend himself, he said. Mistakes had been made, but not just by him. Everyone had learned they needed to be more careful and less certain. They were all to blame.

A former colleague in the audience began heckling him.

“You are telling us fairy tales!” the man shouted. “You are lying!”

“This is not a field court marshal,” Zeira replied. The war was not his fault alone, he said. No one had been willing to stare the most terrifying possibility—a full-scale invasion—in the face.

But then, in a moment of reflection, Zeira conceded that he had made an error. He had ignored the seemingly impossible. He hadn’t thought through all the alternatives as deeply as he should.

“I usually had a note in my pocket,” he told the audience, “and on that little note, it said, ‘and if not?’ ” The note was a talisman, a reminder that the desire to get something done, to be decisive, can also be a weakness. The note was supposed to prompt him to ask bigger questions.

But in the days before the Yom Kippur War, “I didn’t read that little note,” Zeira said. “That was my mistake.”