Stretch goal is a goal deliberately set high, beyond what ordinary effort can reach. In exchange for its being acceptable to fall short, it becomes a trigger for changing the way you work. In this book, 2x, 3x, and 4x quotas are handled with this idea. Because simply raising a number does not make it a stretch goal, the goal is separated from performance reviews and reached by changing how you work.
This Is a Book Dedicated to Stretch Goals
A stretch goal is a goal deliberately set high, beyond what ordinary effort can reach. It is fine if you fall short. In exchange, the goal becomes a trigger for changing the way you work. This book turns that idea into a form that companies delivering goods and services can actually run in their day-to-day work.
Most books on stretch goals end with how to set the goal. But the real difficulty comes afterward. Starting the day after an ambitious goal is set: who does what, and in what order? How do you handle falling short? How do you carry it over into the next year? This book deals with that "afterward."
The chapters of this book follow the flow of running a stretch goal.
• Set the goal — Set an ambitious goal based on last year's results, and separate it from performance reviews (Chapter 2)
• Create capacity — Keep regular months (months other than peak months) open for preparation, and create time by deciding which tasks to stop (Chapters 2 and 5)
• Reach it by changing how you work — Change the order of preparation and the words on your website, not overtime or headcount (Chapters 3, 4, and 6 through 11)
• Draw a line for experiments — Try new tools (generative AI), but stop mistakes before anything is finalized (Chapter 8)
• Keep what you learned — Before asking whether you reached the goal, record what you learned in the Three Lines (three review items) (Chapter 12)
• Go back when things stall — Don't blame anyone for falling short; choose just one chapter to return to (Chapter 13)
• Hand it on — Keep what you learned in records, not in people, and set the next goal where the last one left off (Chapter 14)
Figure 1. The flow of running a stretch goal, and the chapters of this book
This book keeps stretch goals from ending as a matter of willpower. It is a procedure manual for that purpose.
Scene: "This May, Double Last Year. Everyone Hits It."
At the morning meeting at the start of the fiscal year, the president said, "This May, we're going for double last year. I need every one of you to hit your number."
The employees nodded. They had no choice but to nod.
May came. Overtime increased, and people wrote quotes on their days off. Even so, they reached only about 80 percent of the goal. In a review meeting, one employee was told, "You missed your target."
The following year, when goals were being set, that employee proposed a number slightly lower than the year before.
The company had set an ambitious goal, yet a year later the goal itself had gotten smaller. Where, and how, did things go off track?
Japan Is a Little Behind in How It Handles Ambitious Goals
Outside Japan, stretch goals are no longer unusual. In a national survey conducted by researchers in the United States, about half of respondents said their employer had used stretch goals in the past year (See, Miller, and Sitkin, 2023).
There does, however, seem to be a gap between leadership and the front line. In a goal-setting test conducted by Leadership IQ, a U.S. company that researches leadership development and organizations (2020, 12,801 respondents), 54 percent of executives had set difficult or bold goals, compared with 33 percent of frontline employees.
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