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This summary covers The Economist’s April 11th, 2026 Business column listed in the section contents as Bartleby: Stretch goals and published under the headline Stretch or routine?.

The column asks when very hard targets help an organisation break out of stale habits, and when they simply push people into reckless behaviour. Its answer is deliberately balanced: stretch goals can be powerful, but they are not a management magic trick. They work best when they force useful reinvention, not when they turn pressure into denial.

Elon Musk is the article’s central example of the extreme version. His companies are famous for wildly ambitious long-term aims, from Mars travel to humanoid robots, and for operational targets that can sound absurd at first hearing. Drawing on Jon McNeill’s book The Algorithm, the column describes a Tesla culture in which Musk pushed teams to cut an online buying process from 64 clicks to ten and to increase e-commerce sales by a factor of 20. The point was not just to demand more effort. It was to make the existing process look unacceptable.

Why Hard Targets Can Work

The appeal of stretch goals is that they combine clarity with urgency. A vague instruction to improve rarely changes much. A specific and difficult target gives people something sharper to organise around. The column notes that research on goal-setting generally supports this: concrete, demanding targets tend to motivate better than broad encouragement to do one’s best.

Stretch goals can also force a change in method. If a team is asked to do slightly better, it can often keep the same process and work harder. If it is asked to do something that seems nearly impossible, it may have to question assumptions, remove steps and copy ideas from outside its industry. The column uses Southwest Airlines in the 1970s as an example. The airline had to turn planes around in ten minutes to keep a small fleet productive, and it borrowed techniques from racing pit crews to make that happen. A brutal constraint became a source of operational invention.

That is the strongest argument for Musk-style target-setting. It can make hidden waste visible. McNeill’s version of Musk’s “algorithm” begins by questioning every requirement and deleting every unnecessary step. Moderate goals may never create enough pressure to trigger that kind of rethink.

Where Stretch Goals Go Wrong

The same pressure can also distort judgment. If a target is poorly defined, people may hit the metric while damaging the institution. The column points to Continental Illinois, an American bank that in 1976 set out to become one of the country’s top three corporate lenders. It achieved scale partly by relying on volatile money-market borrowing rather than stable retail deposits. By 1984 it was large, fragile and in need of a government bailout.

The article also cites an experiment by Michael Shayne Gary of the University of New South Wales and co-authors. Executive MBA students ran a simulated startup airline and were assigned either a moderate profit-growth target or a much stretchier one. The harder target was technically attainable, but only if participants coordinated aircraft orders, hiring, fares and service quality well. Some did perform better. Many more drove their fictional airlines into bankruptcy or abandoned the original goal once survival became the real issue.

That finding matters because it separates upside from risk-adjusted performance. A stretch goal can create a few spectacular successes, but also a wider spread of failures. That pattern may suit venture capital, where one runaway winner can pay for many losses. It is less obviously desirable in mature companies, public institutions or businesses where reliability matters more than heroic variance.

The Sensible Use Of Ambition

The column’s practical lesson is not that managers should avoid ambition. It is that they should understand what kind of ambition they are using. Some targets are promises the organisation must keep. Others are provocations designed to reveal a better way of working. Confusing the two can demoralise employees, encourage shortcuts and disrupt ordinary operations.

The article is especially wary of applying a high-variance startup logic everywhere. Musk’s methods may fit parts of Tesla or SpaceX, where radical compression of timelines and processes can produce breakthroughs. They worked less well when imported into the machinery of American government, where the costs of disruption land on systems that are supposed to be dependable.

The better answer for most organisations is a portfolio of goals: some realistic enough to anchor execution, others ambitious enough to stretch imagination. The real management skill is knowing which is which. Stretch goals are useful when they make people redesign the work. They are dangerous when they merely make failure look like insufficient commitment.