ABSTRACT
A number of today’s leading-edge organizations have gone beyond setting goals strictly based on past performance. The new approach is called stretch goals, which require employees to rethink and reengineer work. Simply working harder will not allow a team to meet a stretch goal in most cases. One organization has an overall goal for every measure in the corporation called “80 in 5.” This means that they want to see performance improve by 80 percent on all measures in five years. Motorola has received a lot of press for its “Six Sigma” goal, which calls for less than 3.4 defects per million products. Many companies have their own six sigma goals that they have copied from Motorola. Strategies are often pilot-tested in a single unit or location before they are implemented across the organization. Each strategy needs to be evaluated based upon the impact it has on the appropriate performance measures.
