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The mighty challenge with goal setting it seems to me is not setting the goals themselves, but understanding the nature of the goals that are best set. Brands that set low goals undersell their capacity. Brands that over-reach set themselves up for disappointment and/or bad behaviours. Perhaps not surprisingly, goal setting itself often defies sense. Senior decision makers will their brands to do what they want them to do rather than working through what they would be best to do. They stretch when they should be stabilizing, and constrain when they should stretching.
Weak organizations might pursue stretch goals out of desperation and make their dire circumstances worse, those with the capabilities to truly benefit from stretch goals typically fail to do so because the same characteristics that make them well positioned to benefit from stretch goals also limit their inclination to actually pursue them.
The learning for me from this is simple. Be careful what you ask your people to aim for. A target for a brand is also a signal to its culture and the collateral damage from ambitious targets based on the wrong context or intention may be far-reaching and unexpected.
