For decades, goal setting has been promoted as a halcyon pill for improving employee motivation and performance in organizations. Advocates of goal setting argue that for goals to be successful, they should be specific and challenging, and countless studies find that specific, challenging goals motivate performance far better than "do your best" exhortations. The authors of this article, however, argue that it is often these same characteristics of goals that cause them to "go wild." Key conc...

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Subhiksha's setback in organized retail highlights some of the critical failures in execution of a growth strategy.

1. Failure to understand and compete with Kirana or 'Mom and Pop' stores. The Kirana stores offer convenience, sophisticated CRM, credit  etc.  The model for retail stores is to co-exist with a Kirana store, and work out a model, or a 'role in customer's life'

2. Build scale at any cost. Subhikha's case shows how they went about a debt-driven growth and had a very low equity base ...
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