In 1968, the year Intel opened shop, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland cast a theory that surely influenced Andy Grove. First, said Edwin Locke, “hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones. In the intervening half century, more than a thousand studies have confirmed Locke’s discovery as “one of the most tested, and proven, ideas in the whole of management theory.” Among experiments in the field, 90 percent confirm that productivity is enhanced by well-defined,
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