Caroline Adams Miller

It is such a good example that American Airlines, Boeing's biggest customer, just went to them and said, we're about to place an order for 200 planes with Airbus. They've been innovating while you've been sitting still. And so they had this board of directors that was, sorry to say it, it was mostly white men doing what I call planning. the Hobsburg jaw effect.

They were all sitting around inbred ideas and it became sterile. There were no good ideas coming out of that. It was a lot of groupthink. And in the eighties, Jack Welch and other CEOs began to demand higher pay packages. And they used to cut, cut, cut to get more productivity and squeeze workers to the max while giving themselves these avaricious pay packages. Jack Welch is the

absolute poster child for avaricious, just greedy pay packages. It was just one of the worst in 2005. And so this is what happened is these companies just wanted to make more and more money. They wanted to pump up the stock price. Boeing did that and Boeing lost its edge and they stopped innovating and they started to cover up. It became a culture of sloppiness, of lying, of poor quality.

And they knew it. And it was just like the Ford Pinto. These engineers knew that they were signing off on things like drills being left in planes. They would drill and then drop it. And they go, it's OK, just seal it shut. So this has now come out more and more. And they didn't let the pilots train in simulators to just cut costs. Again, it comes down to money.

They wanted to make as much money as possible. So they cut costs. They did not develop what Airbus had developed with more strict guidelines. They didn't develop this long haul carrier that could have more fuel. So it'd be heavier and go longer distances because that's what the world was asking for. So they just retrofitted one of their other workhorse planes, cut corners, lied, cheated,

and took more big pay packages and basically just threw the planes out there. And we now know what happened. These things are predictable and goal setting theory predicts this. When you mix up a learning goal, Boeing had a learning goal. They had to learn how to make this kind of plane. And normally I think it takes six to 10 years to develop a new plane.

They didn't want to lose their customers, particularly American Airlines. They just took shortcuts. I call this faux grit, fake grit. You're not doing the hard work to do something great at the end of the day. So you fake it. So that's what happened. So Boeing is just one of the examples in the book.

Yeah.

So Huberman went from one to several million followers, just as I was recovering from cytomegalovirus, which had me in a hospital for three days. And it took NIH infectious doctors to figure out why I was literally dying. They thought I had leukemia. And so anyway, I was told there was no cure to cytomegalovirus. I had to just relax. Really? Okay.

So I started taking these long walks on the beach. We had just bought a beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. And I was practicing a concept called Utweiden, which is a Dutch word for airing your soul out in windy, salty, cold air. And I did that for miles. And it coincided with Andrew Huberman's podcast, which was three hours. So I was out there for three hours airing my soul out.

And he kept talking about how there was all this research stuck. in medicine, these trials going on and on, but there was already ample evidence to show that these things, whatever they were making a difference in how people lived, how they healed, how to approach supplements, sleep, light. And so he developed protocols. And so these multi-hour podcasts, the public wanted it.

And I could see the hunger as it grew and grew and he became a star. People wanted these protocols. And I realized that even to this day, even though I brought goal setting theory to the mass market in 2008, and then John Doerr, the venture capitalist who invented it, I think he invested in Google and some other startups.

He had goal setting theory in the introduction to his book, Measure What Matters. But other than the two of us, me first, and then him 10 years later, goal setting theory still wasn't known by anybody. And so I'd go around the world and I'd give webinars and talks to hundreds of CEOs and executives. And I would say, how many of you set goals for your companies? Every hand goes up.

How many of you do it with goal-setting theory? No hands go up. And so for 15 years, I watched this and I thought, the world really deserves better. We're over a barrel now. We live in a VUCA environment. Our kids are anxious and depressed. Suicide has gone up and companies have to learn new ways. We're in a

vast learning goal condition in the world right now because of COVID and artificial intelligence. And I said, now we have to know goal setting theory. And I'm going to put protocols in this book that people can now use to experiment with creating success. And every bit of my book is going to be evidence-based.

And I'm going to explain the history of goal setting from time and motion studies to how we got here today and how we can use goal setting theory. But then I added my bridge methodology. which is how I created other protocols. And because what that does is goal setting theory was published in 1990.

There's been a raft of findings around mindset and grit and all kinds of things, priming, you name it, that also impact success. And no one had really pulled together a goal setting book that included everything you need to know. So I did it. And everything in this book is a protocol.

If you buy this book, any manager in the world will be able to set goals correctly with themselves, with their companies, every teenager who wants to make a sports team or make the orchestra in the oboe. This book will tell you how to accomplish your goals. No longer will people have dreams and no idea how to accomplish them. I have dragged goal setting out of the magical law of attraction

the 1980s, 1990s into the 21st century. It is now evidence-based. If you buy this book, everything about it is evidence-based and my protocols will change your life. And the last thing I wanna say, I'm just militant about this. Smart goals isn't science. Period exclamation point. Another exclamation point.

People think smart goals is a thing and it's not, it was a guy in the eighties, George Doran. He wrote an art consultant, just wrote an article for a management magazine and he created an acronym that was sticky, but it's what I call jargon mishmash syndrome. That acronym means different things all over the world, relatable, realistic, It could be measurable, meaningful.