At this week’s GreenBiz conference in Phoenix, Carter Roberts, CEO of WWF, cited the turn-of-the-(last)-century architect Daniel Burnham who said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” The point was that we need audacious goals to make big progress, and I couldn’t agree more. I wrote a piece for my HBR column a couple weeks ago about the power of visionary goals. It began…

Sam Walton once said, “High expectations are the key to everything.” An increasing number of companies — particularly in the auto industry — are heeding that call, setting aggressive, creative, and visionary goals that change their approach to business and how they relate to the wider world.
Consider Nissan’s “Vision Zero” which aims for “zero traffic accidents involving Nissan vehicles that inflict serious or fatal injuries,” according to COO Toshiyuki Shiga. A broad, seemingly impossible systemic goal like this might seem like a social responsibility or public relations strategy — and of course it has those elements. And I’m sure some corporate lawyers aren’t exactly thrilled, since it’s hardly only the car company’s issue – we all have an individual responsibility to drive safely, too. But Nissan is, I think, ignoring the risk-averse nature of our normal business culture and putting itself out there.
It’s brave. But it’s also very good for the business.

Check out the rest of the piece for more of my favorite examples such as Maersk’s big goal to “safely recycle all our ships at the end of their service life”) and others. One goal I mention is French utility EDF’s aim to “ensure equal pay for female employees,” which some readers objected to on the grounds that it’s hardly visionary to pay women equally – that should be the norm. I agree, but sadly, I drew these goals from my public database PivotGoals, which covers the Fortune Global 300, and EDF’s statement was the only one we found like it.
The larger topic here is about setting goals that are not just ambitious, but tied to the reality of the mega-challengs we face – that is goals that are science-based. But impacts that fall under the sustainability banner, there’s no exact threshold or guideline. For those areas there may be some level of performance we know is required to build a thriving future (e.g., on safety, it’s not “science” that tells us we should set a zero fatalities target, but an moral clarity). For these other necessary thresholds, I draw on a new framework being built by Bob Willard, “Future Fit” (Check out his public draft for more info).
At GreenBiz, I co-led a workshop on science-based goals and included an exercise asking the attendees to look at 20 targets from the database and decide if they were based on science, based on an ethical/Future Fit standard, or neither. There were two interesting take-aways from the discussion that ensued: (1) a goal isn’t science-based just because it’s quantitative and (2) all the goals are ‘good’ to some degree, but that doesn’t mean they hit the level of an ethical threshold that brings about a sustainable future.
One other interesting discussion…Kevin Rabinovitch from Mars Inc. suggested a fascinating test to help determine if a goal feels right for the long haul. For example, the group debated this target from Wesfarmers: “Recycle 30% by weight of television and computer equipment imported or manufactured in the previous year.”
But as Kevin pointed out, imagine if you instead flipped the target and said, “our goal is to landfill 70% of the appliances we sell.” You’d know pretty quickly it’s not the right long-term goal. But it might be a fine interim goal and would foment progress toward a circular economy (and as it turns out it is an interim goal as the company has an 80% target for 2021). So takeaway three was that interim targets can be useful, but we still need the longer-term goals.
In future posts, I’ll delve more into these issues and the thresholds we’re using at PivotGoals to screen for science-based or future fit targets.
(Photo: Flickr, Cobbo)
(Andrew’s new book, The Big Pivot, was named a Best Business Book of the Year by Strategy+Business Magazine! Get your copy here. See also Andrew’s TED talk on The Big Pivot. Sign up for Andrew Winston’s blog, via RSS feed, or by email. Follow Andrew on Twitter @AndrewWinston)