SMART Goals

May 22, 2023

Good morning! The warm spring breeze scented with lilacs and apple blossoms is lanolin on the skin. Another of the giants has fallen; Don Bitzan was 97, a parallel presence to my own father. From Don we learned integrity, focus, faithfulness, family, leadership, and fortitude. Horrors!  The United States government is taking steps to eliminate chocolate milk from schools. Remember Chocolate Milk Fridays?! In somewhat related news, we are snacking our way to all sorts of maladies, with $181,000,000,000 in annual snack food purchases, up 11% from the previous year. Potato chips (hooray!) lead the way with approximately $11 billion in sales and climbing. We love our salt, we love our fat, we love our potato! The average U.S. citizen consumes three (3) snacks per day — with snacks being not specifically defined.  (Nielsen data, 2023) Has snacking replaced sitting down for a meal — or are those three (3) schnacks in addition to daily meals?  (Those data not available)

• Nearly one-third (~30%+) of all groceries sold in the United States are sold by the successors of Sam Walton.
  • Quite a legacy, quite a monopoly.
  • Analogous perhaps to Steve Jobs’s garage is Sam Walton’s little corner store.
• Amazon delivered everything from A to Z to our doorsteps during the plague… and now, it will take us to the moon — and hopefully back again.
  • Will the moon module sport that little smiley face?
• We are told by the United States Department of Labour there are approximately 10,000,000 jobs currently available in the U.S. and about 6,000,000 people looking for work.
• “The best prize life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”  (Roosevelt, T.)
• From the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, Salant and Spenkuch (2023) have conducted a fascinating study on decision making.
  • “…when facing multiple good options, Salant suspects consumers, like chess players, may tend toward the alternatives whose benefits are immediately obvious to them —
    • something marketers would do well to keep in mind.
  • ‘If you have a really good product, try to keep it simple,’ he suggests.”
  • The researchers studied 200,000,000 chess moves — from among 4,600,000,000 options — each of which could be objectively evaluated for effectiveness.
    • Every move in chess has an objective ‘good’, ‘better’, or ‘best’ attached to it when considering the end goal of putting the opponent in checkmate.
  • ‘For all sorts of business problems, it’s important to understand how people make decisions on a very basic level.’
  • ‘Business leaders should not assume a top-performing employee will make the right call in a split-second crisis… 
  • …as the chess data suggest the benefits of expertise fade when there’s a time crunch.'”  (And the short-term looms.)
• Think like a farmer:
  • Don’t shout at the crops
  • Don’t blame the crop for not growing fast enough
  • Don’t uproot the crops before they’ve had a chance to grow
  • Choose the best plants for the soil
  • Water, cultivate, and provide nutrients
  • Remove weeds — without damaging the crops
  • There will be good seasons and bad seasons; you can’t control the weather, but you can prepare for it  (Olah, 2023)
• We haven’t visited Bill George and True North in awhile:  (George, Discover Your True North, 2007)
  • Bill provides one of those deep well springs of knowledge, experience, wisdom, and groundedness.
    • Five archetypes of derailing — have you experienced any/ do you know any?
      • Imposters — Lack self-esteem and self-awareness
      • Rationalizers — self-deceive about reasons for their own failure
      • Glory Seekers — Motivated by extrinsic reward and acclaim
      • Loners — Fail to build personal support networks
      • Shooting Stars — Build shallow foundations and keep moving to the next thing
• The world loves acronyms and mnemonic devices — and so why not use them to help you do good?
  • Remember S.M.A.R.T. goals?  Well, we are already moving on to the next frying pan:  F.A.S.T. goals.
  • Pay attention, before this one evolves to the next one:
    • F — Goals should be frequently discussed
    • A — Goals should be ambitious, difficult, but not impossible
    • S — Goals should be specific, what we measure gets done — and/or we know if it’s not getting done
    • T — Goals should be transparent; chart the progress and make it public for all to track and see (Sull, MIT Sloan Management, 2018)
• Are you an over-the shoulder (rearview mirror) investor?
  • If so, quickly go buy natural gas, cured hams, and pork chops… and rid yourself of soybeans and corn.