Every December of my tenure as an e-commerce CTO, I wrote to the North Pole and asked for a little more time—just until the 29th or 28th, at worst holding off until Boxing Day. But the man in red never replied and Christmas never moved.
That was a real deadline: missing it would mean actual death, for our company at least, since we made nearly all our profit in the holiday season. For other examples, consider election day for a political party or a launch window for NASA. In each case, there’s an immovable object at a fixed date; no irresistible force is going to come along and change it.
Americans have their Thanksgiving on a specific Thursday in November, and nearly everyone skips work on the day that follow and joins the mobs crowding the shops to get Christmas gifts. In the US, this “Black Friday” phenomenon is driven by herd behaviour, not the declaration of a government or the movement of the planets, but it’s equally unstoppable.
But outside the US, where Thanksgiving is unknown and confusing, there’s absolutely no reason why retailers should concentrate all their Yuletide selling efforts on a single day—which hasn’t stopped some of them doing so, of course! This weird copycat behaviour seems as odd and unmotivated to me as if, say, Deutsche Bahn laid on hundreds of extra trains between German cities, expecting a mass migration every New Year. I reckon non-US retailers should ignore the US calendar and run their sales on a different day, just to stand out more!
And that’s the lesson for leaders: when you make up an arbitrary internal deadline, even with much fanfare and prizes, everyone knows it’s fake. Just like the British Black Friday, there’s no real-world motivation driving the selected target, and absolutely no one’s surprised when it moves. Check out the US “debt ceiling” for an egregious example of this kind of “movable feast”: it moves upward faster than a lift (“elevator”)!
Try methods like my glidepath model that work much better for drive and action, especially when tied to non-mythical deadlines that really matter and force you to disappoint people helpfully to finish the most important work. Procrustes is your friend when you have something real to aim at, and it’s highly motivational too – try it!