Goals Gone Wild

The Wharton School site examines a study that cautions against a misuse of goals. An excerpt:

The paper is full of cases in which goal setting had negative and sometimes disastrous consequences for a company. Indeed, executives and business experts in those cases frequently failed to realize the prominent role that overly ambitious targets played in causing the eventual problem. One famous case that Schweitzer and his co-authors relate is the storied 2002 collapse of the energy-trading giant Enron. They cite literature noting that the once high-flying Houston-based firm used goals and an incentive system for its salesmen that was based solely on the volume of revenue that they generated -- and not whether the actual trades were sound or profitable -- which became a key factor in Enron's implosion.