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What executive hasn't dreamed of transforming an organization by achieving seemingly impossible goals through sheer force of will? Indeed, in countless business narratives, the practice of setting such objectives has been celebrated as a key source of achievement. But in practice, stretch goals rarely work out, the authors' research shows. Consider Yahoo. When Marissa Mayer took the helm of the ailing internet giant, in 2012, she announced a number of wildly ambitious targets, including the exceptionally difficult objective of achieving double-digit annual growth. Five years later, she'd fallen far short on them all, and Yahoo was still struggling. The problem is that organizations that would most benefit from stretch goals--those with recent wins and slack resources--seldom employ them. But businesses in trouble often adopt them in a desperate attempt to turn things around--and they nearly always fail. This is the stretch goal paradox. In this article the authors explain how to determine whether stretch goals are right for your organization and, if they are not, what alternative strategies you can pursue.

Acquisitions continue to be an important method of strategic redirection and renewal. But many companies experience disappointing results. Research suggests that an important source of success and failure in acquisitions lies in three factors: the involvement of specialists and analysts with independent goals and multiple, fragmented views of the agreement; premature closure and limited consideration of integration issues; and an inability to resolve important areas of ambiguity before an agreement is completed.