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.
What about Japan? The dominant form of goal management in Japan is MBO (management by objectives: a system in which each person sets goals and is evaluated on how well they achieve them). It is often run on the assumption of 100 percent achievement. Of those surveyed, 36.2 percent said their employer uses MBO. By contrast, OKR (a method that manages a goal together with the key results used to measure its achievement), which assumes ambitious goals that may not be fully reached, is used by only 6.6 percent—and that is among people who practice goal management at companies with 500 or more employees. (The details of these surveys are covered in Chapter 2.)
The habit of treating an ambitious goal as "a goal it's acceptable to miss" has not yet taken root in Japanese workplaces. That is where Japan stands today.
A Quota That Is Merely High Is Not a Stretch Goal
There is one thing to be careful about here. Announcing "double last year" for a peak month is not necessarily a stretch goal. Raising the number in proportion to the extra work in a busier month is, by itself, just an ordinary quota.
An ordinary quota: 100 percent achievement is assumed. The way to reach it is usually more of the same: more overtime, more people, pushing through on willpower.
A true stretch goal: Reaching 60 to 70 percent is considered enough. Google, which has long used OKRs internally, advises in its own guide (re:Work) that an OKR achievement rate of around 60 to 70 percent is about right. And the way to reach it is not to pile on effort, but to change the way you work.
Figure 2. An ordinary quota versus a true stretch goal
The company in the opening scene held up the number "double" as if it were a stretch goal, but treated it as an ordinary quota. It demanded 100 percent and penalized those who fell short. All that remained was fatigue, and it was only natural that the next year's goal went down.
This book deals with ambitious peak-month goals so that they don't end up as "merely high quotas," and are instead treated as true stretch goals.
Four Things Japanese Companies Should Adopt
So what should be adopted? Research and practice from outside Japan point to the following four things.
First: Separate goals from evaluations. On the very first day the goal is set, say it out loud: "Falling short of this number will not lower your evaluation." Google, too, writes that OKRs are not the same thing as performance reviews. This is why Chapter 2 of this book decides not to use 2x, 3x, or 4x quotas in performance reviews.
Second: Reach the goal by changing how you work, not by effort. Instead of adding overtime or people, reach the goal by changing the order of preparation and your order-acceptance conditions. The method in this book (the Sheet, the Line, the Closing, the Entrance) is the toolkit for doing that. The meaning of each term is explained shortly, in "The Terms Used in This Book."
Third: Distinguish good failures from bad ones. Trying a new approach and falling short is a failure that leads somewhere. Not preparing, or repeating the same mistake, is a different matter. In this book, before asking whether you reached the goal, you review in the Three Lines whether your preparation was preserved (Chapter 12).
Fourth: Change the questions you ask. Instead of "Why are we behind?", ask "What did we learn this week?" and "Is there an obstacle I can remove?" When the people at the top talk about their own failures and say "I don't know yet," the front line feels safe to experiment. This state, in which people feel it is safe to talk about failure, is called psychological safety.
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