within the next decade Bar-Joseph and Kruglanski, “Intelligence Failure and Need for Cognitive Closure,” 75–99.
need for cognitive closure For more on cognitive closure, please see Steven L. Neuberg and Jason T. Newsom, “Personal Need for Structure: Individual Differences in the Desire for Simpler Structure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65, no. 1 (1993): 113; Cynthia T. F. Klein and Donna M. Webster, “Individual Differences in Argument Scrutiny as Motivated by Need for Cognitive Closure,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 22, no. 2 (2000): 119–29; Carsten K. W. De Dreu, Sander L. Koole, and Frans L. Oldersma, “On the Seizing and Freezing of Negotiator Inferences: Need for Cognitive Closure Moderates the Use of Heuristics in Negotiation,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25, no. 3 (1999): 348–62; A. Chirumbolo, A. Areni, and G. Sensales, “Need for Cognitive Closure and Politics: Voting, Political Attitudes and Attributional Style,” International Journal of Psychology 39 (2004): 245–53; Arie W. Kruglanski, The Psychology of Closed Mindedness (New York: Psychology Press, 2013); Arie W. Kruglanski et al., “When Similarity Breeds Content: Need for Closure and the Allure of Homogeneous and Self-Resembling Groups,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 3 (2002): 648; Steven L. Neuberg and Jason T. Newsom, “Personal Need for Structure: Individual Differences in the Desire for Simpler Structure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65, no. 1 (1993): 113.
“confusion and ambiguity” Bar-Joseph, Watchman Fell Asleep; Donna M. Webster and Arie W. Kruglanski, “Individual Differences in Need for Cognitive Closure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, no. 6 (1994): 1049.
“need for closure introduces a bias” Bar-Joseph and Kruglanski, “Intelligence Failure and Need for Cognitive Closure,” 75–99.
Donna Webster, wrote in 1996 Arie W. Kruglanski and Donna M. Webster, “Motivated Closing of the Mind: ‘Seizing’ and ‘Freezing,’ ” Psychological Review 103, no. 2 (1996): 263.
it has been selected Ibid.; De Dreu, Koole, and Oldersma, “On the Seizing and Freezing of Negotiator Inferences,” 348–62.
we’re making a mistake In an email responding to fact-checking questions, Arie Kruglanski wrote: “People under high need for closure have trouble appreciating others’ perspectives and points of view. People under high need for closure also prefer hierarchical, autocratic, decision making structures in groups because those provide better closure than horizontal or democratic structures that tend to be more chaotic. People under high need for closure are therefore intolerant of diversity, and of dissent in groups and aren’t very creative. Politically, conservatives tend to be higher on need for closure than liberals, but people with high need for closure tend to be more committed to things and values than people low on need for closure.”
“should not expect promotion” Bar-Joseph and Kruglanski, “Intelligence Failure and Need for Cognitive Closure,” 75–99.
“outside the organization” Uri Bar-Joseph, “Intelligence Failure and Success in the War of Yom Kippur,” unpublished paper.
“before war broke out” Abraham Rabinovich, “Three Years Too Late, Golda Meir Understood How War Could Have Been Avoided,” The Times of Israel, September 12, 2013.
Israelis were killed or wounded Zeev Schiff, A History of the Israeli Army, 1874 to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1985).
“generation was nearly lost” Richard S. Lazarus, Fifty Years of the Research and Theory of RS Lazarus: An Analysis of Historical and Perennial Issues (New York: Psychology Press, 2013).
“Even a quarter century later” Kumaraswamy, Revisiting the Yom Kippur War.
good at choosing goals For my understanding of General Electric, I am indebted to Joseph L. Bower and Jay Dial, “Jack Welch: General Electric’s Revolutionary,” Harvard Business School case study no. 394-065, October 1993, revised April 1994; Francis Aguilar and Thomas W. Malnight, “General Electric Co: Preparing for the 1990s,” Harvard Business School case study no. 9-390, December 20, 1989; Francis J. Aguilar, R. Hamermesh, and Caroline Brainard, “General Electric: Reg Jones and Jack Welch,” Harvard Business School case study no. 9-391-144, June 29, 1991; Kirsten Lungberg, “General Electric and the National Broadcasting Company: A Clash of Cultures,” Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government case study, 1989; Nitin Nohria, Anthony J. Mayo, and Mark Benson, “General Electric’s 20th Century CEOs,” Harvard Business School case study, December 2005; Jack Welch and John A. Byrne, Jack: Straight from the Gut (New York: Warner, 2003); Larry Greiner, “Steve Kerr and His Years with Jack Welch at GE,” Journal of Management Inquiry 11, no. 4 (2002): 343–50; Stratford Sherman, “The Mind of Jack Welch,” Fortune, March 27, 1989; Marilyn Harris et al., “Can Jack Welch Reinvent GE?” BusinessWeek, June 30, 1986; Mark Potts, “GE Chief Hopes to Shape Agile Giant,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1988; Noel Tichy and Ram Charan, “Speed Simplicity and Self-Confidence: An Interview with Jack Welch,” Harvard Business Review, September 1989; Ronald Grover and Mark Landler, “NBC Is No Longer a Feather in GE’s Cap,” BusinessWeek, June 2, 1991; Harry Bernstein, “The Two Faces of GE’s ‘Welchism,’ ” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1988; “Jack Welch Reinvents General Electric. Again,” The Economist, March 30, 1991; L. J. Dans, “They Call Him ‘Neutron,’ ” Business Month, March 1988; Richard Ellsworth and Michael Kraft, “Jack Welch at GE: 1981–1989,” Claremont Graduate School, Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management case study; Peter Petre, “Jack Welch: The Man Who Brought GE to Life,” Fortune, January 5, 1987; Peter Petre, “What Welch Has Wrought at GE,” Fortune, July 7, 1986; Stephen W. Quickel, “Welch on Welch,” Financial World, April 3, 1990; Monica Roman, “Big Changes Are Galvanizing General Electric,” BusinessWeek, December 18, 1989; Thomas Stewart, “GE Keeps Those Ideas Coming,” Fortune, August 12, 1991.
“became the work ‘contract’ ” Nitin Nohria, Anthony J. Mayo, and Mark Benson, “General Electric’s 20th Century CEOs,” Harvard Business Review, December 19, 2005, revised April 2011; John Cunningham Wood and Michael C. Wood, Peter F. Drucker: Critical Evaluations in Business and Management, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2005).
best way to set goals Gary P. Latham, Terence R. Mitchell, and Dennis L. Dossett, “Importance of Participative Goal Setting and Anticipated Rewards on Goal Difficulty and Job Performance,” Journal of Applied Psychology 63, no. 2 (1978): 163; Gary P. Latham and Gerard H. Seijts, “The Effects of Proximal and Distal Goals on Performance on a Moderately Complex Task,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 20, no. 4 (1999): 421–29; Gary P. Latham and J. James Baldes, “The ‘Practical Significance’ of Locke’s Theory of Goal Setting,” Journal of Applied Psychology 60, no. 1 (1975): 122; Gary P. Latham and Craig C. Pinder, “Work Motivation Theory and Research at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century,” Annual Review of Psychology 56 (2005): 485–516; Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, “Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A Thirty-Five-Year Odyssey,” American Psychologist 57, no. 9 (2002): 705; A. Bandura, “Self-Regulation of Motivation and Action Through Internal Standards and Goal Systems,” in Goal Concepts in Personality and Social Psychology, ed. L. A. Pervin (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1989), 19–85; Travor C. Brown and Gary P. Latham, “The Effects of Goal Setting and Self-Instruction Training on the Performance of Unionized Employees,” Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations 55, no. 1 (2000): 80–95; Judith F. Bryan and Edwin A. Locke, “Goal Setting as a Means of Increasing Motivation,” Journal of Applied Psychology 51, no. 3 (1967): 274; Scott B. Button, John E. Mathieu, and Dennis M. Zajac, “Goal Orientation in Organizational Research: A Conceptual and Empirical Foundation,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 67, no. 1 (1996): 26–48; Dennis L. Dossett, Gary P. Latham, and Terence R. Mitchell, “Effects of Assigned Versus Participatively Set Goals, Knowledge of Results, and Individual Differences on Employee Behavior When Goal Difficulty Is Held Constant,” Journal of Applied Psychology 64, no. 3 (1979): 291; Elaine S. Elliott and
Carol S. Dweck, “Goals: An Approach to Motivation and Achievement,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54, no. 1 (1988): 5; Judith M. Harackiewicz et al., “Predictors and Consequences of Achievement Goals in the College Classroom: Maintaining Interest and Making the Grade,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73, no. 6 (1997): 1284; Howard J. Klein et al., “Goal Commitment and the Goal-Setting Process: Conceptual Clarification and Empirical Synthesis,” Journal of Applied Psychology 84, no. 6 (1999): 885; Gary P. Latham and Herbert A. Marshall, “The Effects of Self-Set, Participatively Set, and Assigned Goals on the Performance of Government Employees,” Personnel Psychology 35, no. 2 (June 1982): 399–404; Gary P. Latham, Terence R. Mitchell, and Dennis L. Dossett, “Importance of Participative Goal Setting and Anticipated Rewards on Goal Difficulty and Job Performance,” Journal of Applied Psychology 63, no. 2 (1978): 163; Gary P. Latham and Lise M. Saari, “The Effects of Holding Goal Difficulty Constant on Assigned and Participatively Set Goals,” Academy of Management Journal 22, no. 1 (1979): 163–68; Don VandeWalle, William L. Cron, and John W. Slocum, Jr., “The Role of Goal Orientation Following Performance Feedback,” Journal of Applied Psychology 86, no. 4 (2001): 629; Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, eds., New Developments in Goal Setting and Task Performance (London: Routledge, 2013).
how fast they produced text Gary P. Latham and Gary A. Yukl, “Assigned Versus Participative Goal Setting with Educated and Uneducated Woods Workers,” Journal of Applied Psychology 60, no. 3 (1975): 299.
“Making yourself break a goal” In an email responding to fact-checking questions, Latham wrote that achieving goals also requires access to the necessary resources and feedback on goal progress. “For long-term/distal goals, proximal/sub goals should be set. Sub goals do two things: maintain motivation for attaining the distal goal as the attainment of one sub goal leads to the desire to attain another sub goal. Second, feedback from pursuit of each sub goal yields information as to whether you are on- or off-track.”
Latham wrote in 1990 Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham, “New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 15, no. 5 (2006): 265–68.
“the right things,” said Latham In an email responding to fact-checking questions, Latham wrote: “When people lack the ability to attain a performance goal, that is, a goal having to do with a specific desired result such as a golf score of 80 or a 23% increase in revenue, [improper focus or tunnel vision] may occur. The solution is to set a specific, challenging learning goal where the emphasis is on discovering/developing a process, procedure, system that will enable you to improve your performance such as [coming] up with 5 ways you can improve your putting as opposed to put the ball in the cup in no more than 2 strokes.”
business school, for help Kerr was initially one of twenty-four consultants brought in by Jack Welch to expand Work-Outs throughout GE.
more long-term plans Noel M. Tichy and Stratford Sherman, “Walking the Talk at GE,” Training and Development 47, no. 6 (1993): 26–35; Ronald Henkoff, “New Management Secrets from Japan,” Fortune, November 27, 1995; Ron Ashkenas, “Why Work-Out Works: Lessons from GE’s Transformation Process,” Handbook of Business Strategy 4, no. 1 (2003): 15–21; Charles Fishman, “Engines of Democracy,” Fast Company, October 1999, http://www.fastcompany.com/37815/engines-democracy; Thomas A. Stewart, “GE Keeps Those Ideas Coming,” in Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Barry A. Stein, and Todd D. Jick, The Challenge of Organizational Change: How Companies Experience It and Leaders Guide It (New York: The Free Press, 1992): 474–482; Joseph P. Cosco, “General Electric Works It All Out,” Journal of Business Strategy 15, no. 3 (1994): 48–50.
“turn out great” In an email responding to fact-checking questions, Kerr wrote: “I stressed to the leadership teams that ‘saying no to a bad idea is as useful as saying yes to a good one,’ but that they couldn’t dismiss any recommendation by saying things like: ‘We thought of that already,’ or ‘We tried it before and it didn’t work.’ I always made the point that Work-Outs present a terrific opportunity to teach people about the business, and that they owed people a professional, courteous explanation as to why they didn’t support a particular recommendation.”
SMART criteria In an email responding to fact-checking questions, Kerr wrote that he never encouraged people to submit proposals without a rough plan and timeline. “The details of the plan would have to be sketched out after approval,” he wrote.
“ideas are fair game” Cosco, “General Electric Works It All Out,” 48–50.
Japan’s railway system Ronald Henkoff, “New Management Secrets from Japan,” Fortune, November 27, 1995.
invent a faster train The story of Japan’s bullet train as it was told to Jack Welch (and has been repeated in popular nonfiction) differs slightly from the historical record. The account given here reflects the story that was told to Welch, but there are some details that story did not include, such as the fact that the concept for high-speed rail was explored but then abandoned by the Japanese railway prior to World War II. In an email responding to fact-checking questions, a representative of the Central Japan Railway Company wrote that in the 1950s the “Tokaido Line, the main line of Japan, was very crowded and [passengers had] been increasing because of the economical growth after the war, and Japan had to meet the growing needs of passengers to move between Tokyo (capital and largest city) and Osaka (second largest city). Actually there was a concept of ‘Bullet train’ before the WWII, [in] 1939…but because of the war, that plan [had] been suspended. Japan National Railway decided to build [a] new line by standard gauge (many of Japanese conventional [lines adopted] narrow gauge) in 1957. The plan [was accepted] in 1958 by the government and construction had started.” It is also worth noting that private efforts at developing faster trains were also occurring at the same time in Japan. The Odakyu Electric Railway, for instance, was developing a train capable of going ninety miles per hour. For a better understanding of the history of the bullet train, I recommend Toshiji Takatsu, “The History and Future of High-Speed Railways in Japan,” Japan Railway and Transport Review 48 (2007): 6–21; Mamoru Taniguchi, “High Speed Rail in Japan: A Review and Evaluation of the Shinkansen Train” (working paper no. UCTC 103, University of California Transportation Center, 1992); Roderick Smith, “The Japanese Shinkansen: Catalyst for the Renaissance of Rail,” The Journal of Transport History 24, no. 2 (2003): 222–37; Moshe Givoni, “Development and Impact of the Modern High-Speed Train: A Review,” Transport Reviews 26, no. 5 (2006): 593–611.
120 miles per hour In an email responding to fact-checking questions, a representative of the Central Japan Railway Company wrote that “in Japan, [a] JNR (Japan National Railway) engineer was considered [the] elite of Japanese engineers at that time, and the engineer who designed Shinkansen (Mr. Shima) was one of the engineers of JNR….He [had] been working in JNR [a] long time already and had knowledge and experience about railways.” Mr. Shima, the spokesperson noted, was asked, starting in 1955, to oversee Tōkaidō Shinkansen. “At the time of the bullet train project in 1939 I mentioned before, they were already planning to design trains which have [a max speed of] 125 mph. [The] engineer of Shinkansen had the clear aim of tying Tokyo to Osaka by 3 hours from the beginning, and [the] prototype called ‘Series 1000’ achieved 256 km/h (160 mph) in 1963.”
into the 1980s Andrew B. Bernard, Andreas Moxnes, and Yukiko U. Saito, Geography and Firm Performance in the Japanese Production Network (working paper no. 14034, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2014).
“bullet train thinking” S. Kerr and S. Sherman, “Stretch Goals: The Dark Side of Asking for Miracles,” Fortune, November 13, 1995; Sim B. Sitkin et al., “The Paradox of Stretch Goals: Organizations in Pursuit of the Seemingly Impossible,” Academy of Management Review 36, no. 3 (2011): 544–66; Scott Jeffrey, Alan Webb, and Axel K-D. Schulz, “The Effectiveness of Tiered Goals Versus Stretch Goals,” CAAA 2006 Annual Conference Paper (2006); Kenneth R. Thompson, Wayne A. Hoc
hwarter, and Nicholas J. Mathys, “Stretch Targets: What Makes Them Effective?” The Academy of Management Executive 11, no. 3 (1997): 48–60; S. Kerr and D. LePelley, “Stretch Goals: Risks, Possibilities, and Best Practices,” New Developments in Goal Setting and Task Performance (2013): 21–31; Steven Kerr and Steffen Landauer, “Using Stretch Goals to Promote Organizational Effectiveness and Personal Growth: General Electric and Goldman Sachs,” The Academy of Management Executive 18, no. 4 (2004): 134–38; Kelly E. See, “Motivating Individual Performance with Challenging Goals: Is It Better to Stretch a Little or a Lot?” (manuscript presented for publication, Duke University, June 2003); Adrian D. Manning, David B. Lindenmayer, and Joern Fischer, “Stretch Goals and Backcasting: Approaches for Overcoming Barriers to Large-Scale Ecological Restoration,” Restoration Ecology 14, no. 4 (2006): 487–92; Jim Heskett, “Has the Time Come for ‘Stretch’ in Management?” Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge, August 1, 2008, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5989.html.
their own workflow Fishman, “Engines of Democracy,” 33.
goal would have done that In an email responding to fact-checking questions, a spokesman for General Electric wrote that “the Durham plant was created with the flexibility to make such dramatic change[s]. Many adjustments were in process when the plant was opened in 1992. Durham from its inception was created as an ‘incubator’ for new manufacturing practices at GE Aviation. Yes, Jack [Welch] set the bar high—but given the aggressive competition in the aviation business, these goals were a requirement to be successful and to generate the kind of income necessary to fund new engine developments at that time (namely the GE90).”
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