Welcome back, Module 4, the last module in this course. This is the module where we try to bring everything together, building on what we've done so far, what we've done together on emotional tags and biases in decision-making. Our goal is to make better decisions as often as we can. Nothing more, nothing less. Let's start with goal setting. Everyone knows that setting goals are important. I don't have to tell you this. Alice in Wonderland, that kind of famous exchange where Alice asks, "Would you tell me please which way I ought to go from here?" The Cheshire cat says, "Well, that depends a good deal on where you want to get to." Alice says, "I don't much care where." The cat replies, "Then it doesn't matter which way you go." Lewis Carroll told us that and generations of children understood this and I guess so do we. By the way, there's plenty of places you can go like googling to get tutorial on the basics of how to set goals. Let's up our ante and our thinking. This is not goal-setting 101. That's not that complicated really. Let's focus on what we all do on occasion to mess up what should be a straightforward process of setting goals in work and in life. Each of these points are nuances. By the way, nuances is a concept that I'm going to return to in the fourth course in this sequence, in this specialization. But it's a critical one. In space really on what I've seen over literally for decades of working with managers, coaching people young and old alike, and doing research. Here we go. Here's the first point, the danger of having only one dominant goal. Sometimes call that big hairy goal, which is, I think what Jim Collins has called it. I don't know that I agree with that notion. Having only one kind of dominant overwhelming goal. Because what happens if that goal becomes outdated because of changes or because you've so focused on it, that you can pivot. You can't adapt. What if the goal is a good one but you're overwhelming attention to meeting and exceeding that goal makes you miss all the other stuff going on around you, some of which may be even more important. I've said before that's what happened in Motorola. So focused on quality incremental improvement, Six Sigma, that when it came to understanding the significance of the shift in the technology from analog to digital. They didn't get that. They didn't fully appreciate that. Think about Deepwater Horizon. We talked about BP and that's story in the other module. They had one goal in mind. What was it? Cost-cutting. They ignored safety along the way and that one goal, they were pretty good at cost-cutting. They were rewarded for cost-cutting but by focusing so intensely on just that one thing, it became difficult to do anything else and when the something else is safety, you can't give up on that. That's the first point about this kind of danger of focusing on one dominant goal above all else and not having any degree of both flexibility, adaptability, and an understanding that complex organizations, complex tasks often require more than one focus. Second, I call it brilliantly fulfilling the wrong vision. What good is that? Once you move an organization in a strong direction, there's tremendous momentum toward that goal. It becomes difficult to adjust. But the question is, what if that goal is wrong? Remember, again, if you were with me already for course number 1 in the sequence, lessons learned from the Why Smart Executives Fail project, I share a story about Iridium, the satellite phone company that had this truly brilliant genius vision of two people being able to talk to each other no matter where they were in the world. You can be in Alaska, you could be in Australia, but you can talk to each other. It's a beautiful vision, but it's the wrong one. Why was it the wrong one? Because the traditional terrestrial base cell tower system that exists today and that dominates today was growing at such a fast pace, at a much lower price point. That'll be very difficult to actually make Iridium work and and they fulfill that vision, but the vision ended up leading to bankruptcy. Third, linear thinking is one of my favorites actually, and I may have touched on this earlier and I'm probably going to get back to it later because I just find it so interesting. The idea is just because something is good for you, doesn't mean that more of it is even better. That's the problem with managerial mindsets behind some of the goal-setting efforts that people have. For example, at a basic leadership level, we're told, let's be confident. You got to be confident. You have to communicate with presence. You have to have presence as a leader. We all got that, we understand that, and that's great. But is it the case that if you're confident, that's good and if you're more confident that's better and if you're even more confident, that's the best of all, I'm not so sure about that because you can go so far down that confidence train that you'd become arrogant and you close yourself off from other points of view. In fact, what you really need to do is be confident and be humble at the same time. Both are required at the same time. Linear thinking says, we want to have presence as a leader. Therefore, we want to have a lot of confidence and the more the better it's just not true. It's just not true. This is a fact of life in many aspects of leadership. You could say it about humility as well, a lot of people talk about humility as an important leadership characteristic or style. I agree. I think it's important, but you can go so far down that humility train that people are going to walk all over you. You're not going to be able to advance your own career. People won't even know that you played a role in any degree of success. That's the first important point about linear thinking. An excessive focus on incremental improvements can lead managers to concentrate on tactics more than strategy and they might miss the significance of potentially transformational changes. I just mentioned before, Motorola in the mobile phone industry, and how they were so focused on Six Sigma. Once again, it's another example, not just brilliantly fulfilling the wrong vision, but it's also an example of this linear thinking. We're going to be more focused on quality improvement. That's all we're going to do and it's a dangerous game. It's just a dangerous game because it means that we're not understanding that in fact, not only are there other goals that are important as we've already talked about but in fact, there's a natural limit to almost everything that we could think of. I think about this also. I've mentioned it here and there in this course maybe in other courses in this specialization as well this idea that I like food, I'm a foodie. I think about some foodie examples sometimes, and avocados became a big thing to eat. People love the avocados and I love avocados. Is it the case that if an avocado is good to have half avocado, we should have a whole or two or three or four? No, it doesn't make any sense at all. Just because something is good for you doesn't mean more of it is better. A pretty fundamental principle of life. How about incentives? This is a big point. Reach a goal, it's common for leaders to create incentives both formal and informal, both financial, non-financial, and these incentives, what happens? They start driving behavior sometimes in ways that are contrary to what you want. In extreme cases, even towards unethical and illegal activity. Back in that first course on lessons learned from the Why Smart Executives Fail project in Module 3, I talked about some of the unintended consequences of incentives and there are a lot of them. If you've taken that course, you can go back and look at some of those examples. I'll just share with you one of those that just is so powerful. At Wells Fargo, they put in place incentives for bank managers, bank employees, for tellers even to get paid on the basis of how many new accounts and how big those new accounts were for customers, and what did they end up doing? They weren't trained on how to do this. They didn't have the background on how to do this. They felt the stress and the pressure and where did they end up? They ended up creating fake accounts, new accounts and that's not right. I mean, that's illegal. It's unethical and it's illegal, but it's these unintended consequences. If you want to be great at setting goals, which is what we're all about because that's the first step really to making great decisions, let's spend some time thinking about those unintended consequences and now faking it. What is that about, boy? This is when you have a goal, a mission that you don't really believe in. You talk the talk but you don't walk the talk and people will see right through it. A former student of mine called the other day. She'd worked at a major global company in the food industry and her primary responsibility was sourcing a key ingredient that was needed for a particular route product. She had a lot of concerns. She really believed in the environment and social issues and she was concerned about environmental damage that came from traditional methods of cultivating this particular ingredient. In light of this particular company that she worked for, their professed mission of protecting the environment, she decided she would take the initiative, which I always recommend. She would take the initiative and find an alternative source that was grown in a more sustainable way so that they can continue to make whatever it is they were making, but they'd have the ingredient and alternative. But things didn't go as planned. It turns out that the alternative ingredient was 25 percent more expensive than the traditional one. Her bosses' boss was not pleased whatsoever, despite countless company communication initiatives about sustainability, about the environment. When push came to shove at this business, reality surfaced and it wasn't pretty. It was pretty clear that people were not happy with her taking this initiative and they thought that she was nuts to go and find another anyone alternative ingredient that had such a much higher price point. Let's just deal with the fact that we're doing some environmental damage and that's just the way it is, grow up. That was the message that she was getting. She was so disillusioned that she started to look elsewhere for a new job, for a new opportunity more in line with her values. She was really good, it wasn't long before she moved on. The episode marked the beginning of the end for her work at this company and this is a big thing. Particularly big when you think about millennials and Gen Z that really care a lot that people are telling the truth, that people aren't transparent, that people are honest. Transparency between what you say and what you do has never been more important. That is so critical when we think about setting goals. I've now given you five key things to think about. The danger of having one dominant goal. Let's pay attention to that. Brilliantly fulfilling the wrong vision, linear thinking, incentives, and not recognizing the unintended consequences of those incentives and then faking it when you don't really mean what you say when it comes to your goal or your mission. These are the five key lessons that I want you to think about when it comes to setting goals property and putting yourself in a position to make great decisions.
