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One illuminating example of the problem concerns the American automobile behemoth General Motors. The turn of the millennium found GM in a serious predicament, losing customers and profit to more nimble, primarily Japanese, competitors. Following Latham and Locke’s philosophy to the letter, executives at GM’s headquarters in Detroit came up with a goal, crystallized in a number: twenty-nine. Twenty–nine, the company announced amid much media fanfare, was the percentage of the American car market that it would recapture, reasserting its old dominance. Twenty-nine was also the number displayed upon small gold lapel pins, worn by senior figures at GM to demonstrate their commitment to the plan. At corporate gatherings, and it internal GM documents, twenty-nine was the target drummed into everyone from salespeople to engineers to public-relations officers.

Yet the plan not only failed to work – it made things worse. Obsessed with winning back market share, GM spent it dwindling finances on money-off schemes and clever advertising, trying to lure drivers into purchasing its unpopular cars, rather than investing in the more speculative and open-ended – and thus more uncertain – research that might have resulted in more innovative and more popular vehicles.

There were certainly many other reasons for GM’s ongoing decline. But twenty-nine became a fetish, distorting the organisation in damaging ways, fuelling short-termism and blinkered vision, all so that the numbers in the business news headlines might match those on the vice-presidents’ lapels. But that never happened. GM continued spiralling towards failure, and went bankrupt in 2009; it ended up taking a bailout from Washington. At the Detroit Auto Show of 2010, the firms newly installed president for North America, keen to show how much GM had changed, used the twenty-nine campaign as an example of what it would no longer be doing. ‘We’re not printing (lapel) pins,’ he told a radio reporter. ‘We’re not doing any of that stuff.’    

Excerpted from ‘The Antidote – Happiness for People who can’t stand positive thinking’ by Oliver Burkeman