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 counter
productive 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.
Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business Page 12