Twenty-seven days after fighting concluded in the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli parliament established a national committee of inquiry to examine why the nation had been so dangerously unprepared. Officials met for 140 sessions and heard testimony from fifty-eight witnesses, including Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and the head of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, Eli Zeira.
“In the days that preceded the Yom Kippur war, the Research Division of Military Intelligence had plenty of warning indicators,” investigators concluded. There was no justification for Israel to have been caught off guard. Zeira and his colleagues had ignored obvious signs of danger. They had dissuaded other leaders from following their instincts. These mistakes were not made out of malice, investigators said, but because Zeira and his staff had become so obsessed with avoiding unnecessary panic and making firm decisions that they lost sight of their most important objective: keeping Israelis safe.
Prime Minister Meir resigned one week after the government’s report was released. Moshe Dayan, the onetime hero, was hounded by critics until his death six years later. And Zeira was relieved of his position and forced to resign from government service.
Zeira’s failings in the run-up to the Yom Kippur War illustrate one final lesson regarding how goals function and influence our psychology. He, in fact, was using both stretch and SMART goals when he convinced the nation’s leaders to ignore obvious signs of war. He had clear and grand ambitions to end the cycle of anxiety plaguing Israelis; he knew that his big aim was to stop the endless debates and second-guessing. And his methods for breaking those larger goals into smaller pieces involved finding proximal goals that were specific, measurable, achievable, and realistic, and that occurred according to a timeline. He remade his agency in a deliberate, step-by-step manner. He did everything that psychologists like Latham and Locke have said we ought to do in order to achieve both big and small goals.
Yet Zeira’s craving for closure and his intolerance for revisiting questions once they were answered are among the biggest reasons why Israel failed to anticipate the attacks. Zeira is an example of how stretch and SMART goals, on their own, sometimes aren’t enough. In addition to having audacious ambitions and plans that are thorough, we still need, occasionally, to step outside the day-to-day and consider if we’re moving toward goals that make sense. We still need to think.
On October 6, 2013, the fortieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Eli Zeira addressed an audience of national security scholars in Tel Aviv. He was eighty-five years old and his gait was a bit unsteady as he walked onto the stage. He spoke haltingly from handwritten notes. He had come to defend himself, he said. Mistakes had been made, but not just by him. Everyone had learned they needed to be more careful and less certain. They were all to blame.
A former colleague in the audience began heckling him.
“You are telling us fairy tales!” the man shouted. “You are lying!”
“This is not a field court marshal,” Zeira replied. The war was not his fault alone, he said. No one had been willing to stare the most terrifying possibility—a full-scale invasion—in the face.
But then, in a moment of reflection, Zeira conceded that he had made an error. He had ignored the seemingly impossible. He hadn’t thought through all the alternatives as deeply as he should.
“I usually had a note in my pocket,” he told the audience, “and on that little note, it said, ‘and if not?’?” The note was a talisman, a reminder that the desire to get something done, to be decisive, can also be a weakness. The note was supposed to prompt him to ask bigger questions.
But in the days before the Yom Kippur War, “I didn’t read that little note,” Zeira said. “That was my mistake.”
MANAGING OTHERS
Solving a Kidnapping with Lean and Agile Thinking and a Culture of Trust
Frank Janssen had just returned home from a bike ride when he heard a knock at the front door. It was a sunny Saturday morning; there were kids playing soccer a few blocks away. When Janssen looked out the window, he saw a woman holding a clipboard and two men dressed in khakis and button-down shirts. Perhaps they were conducting a survey? Or they were religious missionaries? Janssen didn’t know why they were on his doorstep, but he hoped it wouldn’t take more than a moment to shoo them away.
When he opened the door, however, the men pushed their way inside. One of them grabbed Janssen, shoved him against the wall, and then threw him to the floor. He pulled a gun from his waistband and slammed the barrel across Janssen’s face. The other man pressed a stun gun against Janssen’s torso and pulled the trigger, momentarily paralyzing the sixty-three-year-old. Then they bound his hands with a plastic zip tie and carried him outside, into the backseat of a silver Nissan waiting in the driveway. The two men sat on either side of Janssen while the woman sat up front, next to the driver. As Janssen slowly regained control of his body, he began shoving his attackers. They pushed him to the floor and applied the stun gun again. The car backed onto the street and headed west, past the field where kids were playing soccer. One of the assailants draped a blanket over Janssen’s body. The vehicle turned onto a freeway and slipped into southbound traffic.*
Janssen’s wife came home about an hour later and found the house empty and the front door ajar. Frank’s bike was propped against the garage. Maybe he had gone for a walk? An hour later, with no sign of him, his wife grew concerned. She searched the entryway, thinking he might have left a note. On the doorstep, she saw a few drops of blood. Panicked, she walked toward the driveway and found more blood outside. She phoned her daughter, who told her to call the police.
Her husband, she explained to officers, was a consultant at a firm specializing in national security. Soon her home was surrounded by police cruisers and yellow crime-scene tape. Black SUVs pulled up, delivering a team of FBI agents who dusted for prints and photographed indentations in the grass. For the next two days, agents pored over Janssen’s cellphone records and interviewed neighbors and coworkers, but found nothing to indicate what was going on.
Then, three days after the abduction, in the middle of the night of April 7, 2014, his wife’s phone buzzed. It was a series of text messages from an unfamiliar number with a New York City area code.
We have your husband, the texts read, and he is in the trunk of a car going to California. If she contacted the police, we will send him back to you in 6 boxes and every chance we get we will take someone in you family to italy and torture them and kill them, we will do a drive by and gun down anybody in you family and we will throw grenades in you window.
The texts also referenced Janssen’s daughter and a man named Kelvin Melton. Suddenly, things started making a bit more sense. Janssen’s daughter, Colleen, was an assistant district attorney in nearby Wake Forest, and she had prosecuted Melton, a high-ranking gang member in the Bloods, a few years earlier. Colleen had successfully sent Melton to jail for the rest of his life on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon. A theory began to emerge: Government investigators suspected that the Bloods had kidnapped Frank Janssen to punish his daughter. This was revenge for putting one of their leaders behind bars.