Unachievable Goals
Lessons from Bruce: Part One
(My fifth book will be hitting store shelves in March and this series of notes draws on some of the key business insights in that text. Six Tires, No Plan is the biography of Bruce Halle, who founded a commodity business (Discount Tire Company) in a saturated market and ended up 96th on the Forbes 400 list. The lessons Halle learned on the way to the top offer important insights—and questions—for the rest of us.)
What do we want? More. When do we want it? By the end of the next budget year.
Of course, asking for more isn’t always the way to actually get more from employees. In building Discount Tire Company, founder Bruce Halle learned that it’s possible to get more by asking for less. Not by asking for a decline, of course, but by avoiding the temptation to set unachievable goals and hoping to get close to the target.
The challenge with most misdirected goals, Halle learned, is that people recognize early that they won’t be able to reach them. Discouraged, many managers simply stop trying. After all, if failure is nearly guaranteed, why bother at all? Worse, if the goals themselves make managers feel like failures, how will they energize the people who work for them?
Halle figured out that it’s possible to get better results by setting the bar lower, giving managers goals they can reach and exceed. If managers have the right work ethic, they’ll be energized by success and determined to build on their gains. As they get closer to the target, their enthusiasm grows, which builds the momentum to exceed the goals.
Ultimately, it seems, goal achievement is more a matter of enthusiasm than milestones. When it comes to budgeting for growth, less can yield more—and vice versa.
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