Page 149 - Hard Goals

140 HARD Goals

stayed strong. In fact, while they beat the “do your best” crowd
throughout the experiment, they really started clobbering them
about 90 minutes into the session.
In one of Latham’s experiments, drawn from his early
work with Weyerhaeuser (the giant forestry, wood, and paper
company), the research team studied how diffi cult goals could
3
improve the performance of logging truck drivers. For logging
trucks, as with many commercial trucks, you really want them
to be as close as possible to their maximum legal weight (other-
wise you need multiple runs, which costs time, fuel, and trucks).
But it’s not easy to make happen; giant logs are all different
sizes, they have to be fi t on the trucks, weights need to be accu-
rate, and so on.
For this experiment, it was determined that a load that was
94 percent of the maximum legal net weight would be diffi cult,
but not impossible to achieve. When workers were given a “do
your best” goal, they loaded the trucks to somewhere around
60 percent of the maximum legal weight (lots of wasted space).
But when they were given the signifi cantly more diffi cult goal of
loading the trucks to 94 percent of their maximum legal weight,
lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened. I should note that
usually experiments like this cost money (scientists aren’t free).
But this one simple experiment, conducted in Oklahoma, actu-
ally saved the company around $250,000.
It doesn’t much matter what the situation is; setting diffi cult
goals leads to better performance. Even in a study of brain-
damaged patients at a rehabilitation hospital, diffi cult goals led
4
to better performance. The patients were given series of arith-
metic problems, and after three series they were assigned to a
diffi cult goals group or a “do your best” group. The diffi cult
goals group was told, “on the last three blocks, you correctly