A rival is handed a highly visible project or target nobody could meet by someone who controls its resources and evaluation, so the public failure does what a direct removal would have cost.
An example
After buying a regional maker of precast concrete, the chief executive of a building-products holding company wanted to fold it into central operations, and the subsidiary's president, who had built it, stood in the way. He set her first-year EBITDA target at 180 percent of the acquisition model, with no baseline analysis behind it and a freeze on the two plant managers she had asked to hire. She accepted the target at the board meeting where it was announced, saying the team would give it everything. Six quarters later the subsidiary had grown earnings by a fifth, its best run in a decade, and missed the target by a wide margin. The chief executive presented the shortfall to the board as evidence that the business could not operate on its own. The board approved the integration, and her role was eliminated.
Why it works
Removing a credentialed rival directly is expensive, with accusations of a purge, board concern, and a demoralized network. An impossible mandate turns the removal into the apparent result of the rival's own performance, which makes it cheap. As the failure unfolds in public, the rival's past wins get rewritten as luck and their standing looks worse in real time. Defending them becomes costly, because allies now seem to defend a documented miss. Four conditions carry it. The mandate looks ambitious but defensible at announcement, the audience treats the miss as objective, the rival is too committed to refuse, and the assigner controls the resources, the definitions, and the post-mortem.
The thinking behind it
Jonathan Baron Baron and Hershey's Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation (1988) found that the same decision, made with the same information, is judged better and its maker more competent when the outcome happens to be good. A target set at 180 percent of the model all but guarantees a bad outcome, which is then read as evidence about the subsidiary president's competence. Objecting on the record with a forecast, when the target is set, gives evaluators information besides the outcome.
Lee Ross Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz's Social Roles, Social Control, and Biases in Social-Perception Processes (1977) found that quiz players who wrote the questions were judged more knowledgeable than those who answered them, though the roles alone made the difference. The assigner who sets the target holds the questioner's role, and the person who must meet it looks weaker for reasons the roles created. Asking who scoped the work alongside who delivered it exposes the roles.
Warning signs
A highly visible mandate carries a deadline, budget, or target that no comparable effort has met, or goals that contradict each other. No baseline analysis sits behind the target, which is far above earlier forecasts. The person who set the scope also controls the headcount and dependencies it needs, and will judge the result and write the post-mortem. At launch the assignment looked plausible enough that declining would have seemed insubordinate.
How to defend yourself
Accountability is framed at announcement, and that is where the contest is decided. Fighting the brief later, once failure is visible, rarely works.
- Object on the record when the mandate is set: state that the constraints as given cannot produce the objective, attach your own forecast, and name what you will deliver instead.
- List the resources and dependencies the mandate needs, and who controls each, in writing to the people who will judge the result.
- Report progress against your own forecast as well as the official target, every period.
- When the verdict comes, put the question of who scoped the work beside the question of who delivered it.
Show the setup to your evaluators before the miss arrives. Afterward, the target's realism is buried.
How a leader shuts it down
Separate target-setting from outcome evaluation, and run a pre-mortem on the realism of any major target before it is locked. Distinguish missing an absurd target from underperforming. When a leader fails on a mandate, ask who scoped it as well as who delivered it. A manufactured failure also burns real budget and people, a cost to the company whoever it was aimed at.