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.