'Goals Gone Wild': How Goal Setting Can Lead to Disaster

Despite evidence that ambitious goal setting can hurt productivity, damage a company’s reputation and violate ethical standards, its use has become endemic in American business practice and scholarship, even spilling over to the debate on how to improve America’s public schools. A new paper by Wharton operations and information management professor Maurice E. Schweitzer and three co-authors documents the hazards of corporate goal setting and concludes that it is overprescribed.