American View: How Poor Writing Sabotages Your Intended Results

Management

It’s time we accept an unpopular truth: office motivational posters aren’t always wrong. As pithy as they seem, sometimes they tell an objective truth. I tripped over a good one the other day thanks to a fouled-up Google search when I ran into a long list of variations on a well-loved quote from Professor Kenici Ohmae that goes “Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.” I can’t argue with that assertion, and it makes for a solid poster. Pinterest seems to agree: I noticed a metric ton of cute motivational images bearing Prof. Ohmae’s quote. If that’s the sort of message you want to share with your workgroup, you have hundreds of different ways to convey it. Enjoy!

It’s comforting to know that not all HR sloganeering is cynical, vapid, or just plain wrong. Sometimes, a visually appealing lithograph can convey a darned good point. I think about this every January when it’s time draft my (or my people’s) new year’s performance standards. For the last fifteen years or so, it seems that every employer wants S.M.A.R.T. goals [1] … I prefer to focus on objectives that people can achieve in a year’s time and that will somehow be worth something when the year’s over. Those elements reflect the A and the R elements. Unfortunately for everyone, most bosses obsess instead over the S, M, and T elements since those three goal components are easily measurable (and, therefore, more useful to a boss come raise, promotion, and retention time). [2]

The management practice of valuing labour more than results synchs up nicely with Ohmae’s quote. It ought to be self-evident that effort alone doesn’t bring success if the work invested isn’t contributing to the correct objectives. Who cares how many nautical miles you rowed each fiscal quarter if you never made it to the correct port before your cargo spoiled?

The thing is, supervisors aren’t “anti-results” as a rule; it’s just that they often have little to no idea what correct “results” might look like for their team. The lower one resides on the authority pyramid, the less one understands what the heck is going on ... What matter and what doesn’t from a cross-disciplinary perspective. A supervisor can’t define what constitutes “correct” results for their underlings if they have no idea how their work fits into the big picture. The best they can do is take a stab at it with guesswork, modified by their biases and experience. That makes writing annual performance goals a hazardous challenge. Guess wrong, and you’re sabotaging both your minion’s prospects and your own. From a pragmatic standpoint, it’s better to draft Achievable goals that don’t matter than strive for a specific result.

We used to joke about how the Soviets’ “command economy” did exactly this during the Cold War: “The new five-year plan required the Magnitogorsk steel plant to produce 1,000 tons of steel for tank production. To ensure they met the plan, they made one big 1,000-ton ingot each year.”

This idea became a major talking pop couture issue here in the states last summer after a cheesy country music single became a surprise chart hit and, as all things must, also became a flashpoint in our endless left/right culture war idiocy. If you missed it – lucky you! – a previously unknown singer/songwriter going by Oliver Anthony Music self-published a music video for his song “Rich Men North of Richmond.” According to the artist, Oliver’s song was meant to protest how our feckless and self-interested politicians have consistently failed to alleviate the suffering affecting him and his community. As Doctor Adam Brandt said in his Psychology Today analysis:

“Historically speaking, politicians do not represent the interest of the people, though they often create the illusion that they do. … Political acts of service toward the people’s interests often come as concessions to buy public favor in an upcoming election, and oftentimes if there’s not enough social pressure, these acts are seen as embarrassing or vapid.” [3]

To his credit, Oliver song started … fine. His opening verse: “I’ve been selling my soul … Working all day … Overtime hours … for bullsh*t pay” resonated with listeners on the left and right given the last few decades of the super-rich getting fabulously richer while the poor and middle class got thoroughly screwed over. For a country tune, it’s a smart way to start a protest anthem.

Unfortunately, Oliver quickly lost the plot of his own narrative. In his second verse, he gave us one of the best “bootlegger reverse” tonal shifts in recent music history when he whined: “Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothing to eat … And the obese milking welfare … Well God, if you’re 5 foot 3, and you’re 300 pounds … Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.”

Um … what? Are you mad at two-faced and ineffective politicians for their systemic policy failures and self-serving votes or are you mad at … [re-checks notes] … economically struggling citizens who have no political influence and are, in fact, victims of the aforementioned politicians? I’d say “pick a lane, bud” but you just rhetorically spun out through all of them and came to rest facing oncoming traffic.

Looks cool on paper. Accomplishes little. Permanently damages the tyres. Sounds like the right analogy to me …

Todd in the Shadows – the world’s best music critic – analysed Oliver’s hit in his Pop Song Review series towards the end of September. [4] When Oliver’s lyrics finished their violent 180° turn, Todd snarked: “There it is! That’s what I was waiting for: the sign that I do not have to take this seriously. I think that’s where everyone I know checked out and wrote this guy off. … I mean, you can get angry at ‘welfare queens’ or you can get angry at hunger and homelessness … not both.”

If you’re not familiar with the American slang term, NPR did a story ten years back on the origin of the original “welfare queen” shibboleth. It was (and still is) a racist dog whistle popularized by former President Reagan back in the 1970s and by far-right fearmongers ever since. It employs mostly-fabricated stereotypes to argue that no one should ever receive any form of government assistance since there are supposedly some criminals on benefits that are scamming the system. It’s a way to “other” women and people of colour and justify institutionalized racism.

As Todd explained, “The only way [Oliver’s] argument makes any sense is if you think that some people shouldn’t get any help … you know … those people …” Later, Todd concludes “There’s just no way of getting around that [this song] sounds like a political ad.” He’s right. It does. A cheap and condescending ad at that. It’s preaching to the converted, not advancing an argument.

Looking back, I get why invested “culture war” cranks astroturf’ed this song into a number one pop hit. It starts off approachable, then veers hard into division-ist bigot territory. It pretends to be an “everyman” anthem then swiftly changes to preach far right talking points. It abandons its thesis as soon as the listener gets interested. It ain’t good art. It ain’t even good propaganda.

That said, it is an excellent illustration of a Specific, Measurable, and Time-bound goal. Or, rather, the song’s success reflects the achievement of a goal. Assuming Oliver wanted to deliver specific divisive talking points to a wide audience in a three-minute-long country sone, he nailed it. His song got 147,000 downloads and 17.5 million streams in a single week. Since then, his tune has remained in constant rotation … here in Texas, at least. My youngest griped that he hears “Rich Men North of Richmond” play once per hour on the radio every day at work. If Oliver were a corporate drone and made this sog one of his performance goals for FY23, he’d have earned full marks come annual review time. Hell, I think he would’ve earned bonus points since a song from an unknown artist debuting at #1 doesn’t sound even remotely Achievable … but he pulled it off. So … congrats?

Perfectly nails the theme of Dire Straits’ #1 Billboard and MTV hit “Money for Nothing” from 1985.

What Oliver wouldn’t have earned was any credit towards his goal being Relevant. While he did manage to reach millions of listeners, he completely self-sabotaged any sort of coherent, actionable message. His song’s title and opening set up a solid, emotionally relevant argument … and then the rest of his song so thoroughly confused his thesis that he lost his audience. He alienated his left-wing and centrist fans by invoking racist dog whistles in verse two, and alienated his far right fans by actively Oliver disavowing them after his song got popular. As far as inspiring any sort of corrective action – something a protest anthem is supposed to do – his art had zero impact.

In the corporate world, though, four out of five wins on a S.M.A.R.T. goal count as a rousing success. Given how disconnected most mid-level leaders are from corporate strategy, what matters most is checking off tasks. So long as your workers paddled impressively and didn’t rock the boat, it doesn’t which way the boat is pointing. Effort matters more than results. Upper management is responsible for turning effort into value … somehow. Usually by moving the goalposts.

This tedious annual tradition is why I’ve always hated “goal setting” as a quasi-religious obsession. It’s one thing to set performance targets for a repeatable, defined process. Say, to manufacture no less than 100 widgets per work cycle according to published quality standards. That’s not only S.M.A.R.T., it’s straight out of Frederick Taylor’s century old “scientific management” theory. Tried and tested.

Most corpo jobs, though, aren’t as clearly definable as a blue-collar manufacturing gig. A goal like “answer all engineering queries within thirty minutes” or “deliver all new-hire tablet PCs on the recipient’s first day” either have to be written with ridiculously over-long performance windows to be Achievable, or else they have to have exceptions built in so as not to penalize the worker for circumstances that make the goal’s performance target impossible to fulfil. Reminds me of a performance that a developer pal got calling for a minimum number of “checked in lines of code” per workday. Not useful code. Not working code. Not even necessary code … just quantity.

My proposed antidote for this syndrome is hardly controversial: write your goals such that they clearly reflect delivering on your team’s official remit. Reward people for doing the work that matters, proportionately to how swiftly and how effectively they delivered. Save the “easily Measurable” stuff for the manufacturing folks. Keep your corpo drones aligned on the mission, not on the output rate. Or, as Kenici Ohmae should’ve said “Get your metaphorical boat headed in the right direction before you worry about how fast you’re going.” Otherwise you’re just wasting everyone’s time.

[1] In their most common definition, standing for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound” respectively.
[2] An attitude sometimes derided as “prioritising SMuT over aRT.”
[3] See also “duh.”
[4] If you’re not already Todd fan, you’re in for a delightful time. Give his review video a watch. Then go back and watch all his old stuff.

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