Rob Artigo: Today we’re talking about ambitious but smart goal setting. The standard is not a little bit better than last year. It’s set goals that force you to grow far beyond your current self. Ray, you’ve said goals exist to make us look up, lengthen our stride and reach past what we already know how to do. Why isn’t it a comfortable goal worth writing down?

Ray Zinn: Well, if it’s comfortable, it means you’re not pushing yourself. And that’s a showstopper. You want to actually force yourself to do better. I can remember when I started my crawl, I wanted to push myself and take on things which would cause a company to stretch itself, but not where it would kill it or break it as you would. So you don’t want to break the company, but you do want it to push it. You know that if you have a personal trainer in an exercise gym, they push you. They get you to do one more, do five more, do this, do that. They’re constantly pushing you to do better. And if you’re not pushing yourself to do better, your company’s not going to grow. So you got to be your own personal trainer or maybe your mentor will help you push yourself to be like a trainer would to get these goals, not goals which are ridiculous.

A good personal trainer doesn’t make you go where you injure yourself. He knows what your limitations are. That’s what makes a good personal trainer, but he pushes you to exceed what you think you can do so that you are able to do it ultimately.

Rob Artigo: There’s a trap on one side of this that you’ve drawn the line between an ambitious founder and an overly optimistic one. Ambition with a periscope versus a pipe dream with no plan. How does someone tell whether a stretch goal is going to grow them or just lie to them?

Ray Zinn: Well, that’s why you need a mentor. If you’re pushing yourself beyond what you can do, then you’re going to injure yourself. You’re going to injure the company, you’re going to injure your employees. So you need a good mentor that will help not exceed your ability, spending more money than you have or taking on a product line that you aren’t able to finish or taking on a customer that you can’t support. You need to know your limitations and you need to make sure that whatever it is you’re attempting to do is within your capability to perform it.

Rob Artigo: Several companies that come to mind that fit this category of a long range plan, Boeing, Walmart, Merck, and General Electric are all strong examples of what we would think of as enduring American companies. One researcher analyzed this angle and said these companies used ambitious yet smart goal setting and they called it big, hairy, audacious goals. These are clear, compelling long-term targets that can be up like 25 or more years in the plan. It feels nearly impossible to plan that far and it carries risk of failure and can force an organization to stretch far beyond its current capabilities and culture and even scale while remaining aligned with core principles. So do you agree with that assessment?

Ray Zinn: Yeah. I call it the Kmart phenomena. Remember Kmart?

Rob Artigo: Yeah, sure.

Ray Zinn: Yeah. We used to call it Kmart fall apart. So their quality wasn’t good. And so that’s what caused Kmart to fail is not keeping their product line reliable and good. It’s just cheap, it’s junk. What caused Kmart not to succeed was their philosophy of the cheap is best. And if cheap is not reliable and not dependable, then it’s going to come back to hurt you. So that’s an example of a company that didn’t succeed because they just, Kmart fall apart as you would. Look what’s happened to Boeing. I mean, Boeing, look how long they’ve been in business and look at the problems they’ve had. I mean, you talk about stretching yourself, the 737 max issue would’ve killed most companies, but not Boeing. They fixed it. Did they have a problem? Yeah. Did they make a mistake? Yes. Did they fix it? Yes. The key here is you’re going to make mistakes, but you fix them.

And companies like General Electric, Walmart and Boeing and companies like that that have lived well beyond their normal maturity have done so by just fixing their mistakes, not living with them, fixing them.

Rob Artigo: Yeah. I think of making a long-term plan and let’s say you make an audacious, aggressive goal, you set the goal and you think maybe the goal maybe even outlasts you if you plan it in a certain way. Let’s say the company, the organization reaches that goal and then stalls out because it stopped making goals. It said, “We’re in the midst of a goal right now. Let’s just complete this goal.” And then they hit a mark. And I think that Boeing is a good example of that. They hit a problem with the Max. They had a major problem and it seems like, and we could break it down and probably spend a couple of hours talking about Boeing, but they lost a little bit in the culture. They lost a little bit in their quality. They did some things that if they had continued to plan ahead with long range goals, instead of letting it flounder once they reached a specific plateau, that they might have been able to get through that without the problems that they had.

Is that something that can happen if you reach an area where you’re getting to a plateau and then you don’t set a new goal?

Ray Zinn: We’re going to make mistakes. Does Boeing make mistakes? Yes. Does Walmart make mistakes? Yes. Does GE make mistakes? Yes. But they fix them. Kmart did not fix their mistakes. They had no plan to fix their mistakes. Boeing has the resources and the resolution to fix mistakes. Key here is, are you going to make mistake? Yes. Are you going to fix a mistake? That’s the key. So the key is that fix the mistake. Boeing didn’t just say, “Well, we’re not going to produce the 737 Max. We’re going to fix it.” And so that’s what they did. You could say, “Well, it was a bad management.” You’re going to have that. You’re going to be faced with challenges and problems. And I think the perfect example of that is Boeing. They’re probably the greatest aircraft company in the world and they have mistakes. I don’t know of a single company that doesn’t have mistakes.

Did Mike Correll have mistakes? Absolutely. Did we fix them? Absolutely. And that’s why we succeeded. And so you can’t be afraid of mistakes. The fear of making a mistake is that we were talked about that in the previous video about worrying. If you worry about something you can’t fix, then you’re going to fail. So you want to be able to have the resilience to fix the mistake. And we talked about that in a previous video. The key is that have the resolve, honestly repent and fix the mistakes that we make.

Rob Artigo: So aim higher than the person you already are, then put a plan under it so it isn’t just a daydream. That’s a good way of looking at it. Listeners are welcome to join us at toughthingsfirst.com to continue the conversation. Questions for Ray are Welcome? The podcast archive is there. Also the books, Tough Things First: The Essential Leader in the Zen of Zinn series. Follow Ray on X, Facebook and LinkedIn. Ray, thanks as always.

Ray Zinn: Thank you, Rob.