Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

by Charles Duhigg

  “In the days that preceded the Yom Kippur war, the Research Division of Military Intelligence had plenty of warning indicators,” investigators concluded. There was no justification for Israel to have been caught off guard. Zeira and his colleagues had ignored obvious signs of danger. They had dissuaded other leaders from following their instincts. These mistakes were not made out of malice, investigators said, but because Zeira and his staff had become so obsessed with avoiding unnecessary panic and making firm decisions that they lost sight of their most important objective: keeping Israelis safe.

  Prime Minister Meir resigned one week after the government’s report was released. Moshe Dayan, the onetime hero, was hounded by critics until his death six years later. And Zeira was relieved of his position and forced to resign from government service.

  Zeira’s failings in the run-up to the Yom Kippur War illustrate one final lesson regarding how goals function and influence our psychology. He, in fact, was using both stretch and SMART goals when he convinced the nation’s leaders to ignore obvious signs of war. He had clear and grand ambitions to end the cycle of anxiety plaguing Israelis; he knew that his big aim was to stop the endless debates and second-guessing. And his methods for breaking those larger goals into smaller pieces involved finding proximal goals that were specific, measurable, achievable, and realistic, and that occurred according to a timeline. He remade his agency in a deliberate, step-by-step manner. He did everything that psychologists like Latham and Locke have said we ought to do in order to achieve both big and small goals.

  Yet Zeira’s craving for closure and his intolerance for revisiting questions once they were answered are among the biggest reasons why Israel failed to anticipate the attacks. Zeira is an example of how stretch and SMART goals, on their own, sometimes aren’t enough. In addition to having audacious ambitions and plans that are thorough, we still need, occasionally, to step outside the day-to-day and consider if we’re moving toward goals that make sense. We still need to think.

  On October 6, 2013, the fortieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, Eli Zeira addressed an audience of national security scholars in Tel Aviv. He was eighty-five years old and his gait was a bit unsteady as he walked onto the stage. He spoke haltingly from handwritten notes. He had come to defend himself, he said. Mistakes had been made, but not just by him. Everyone had learned they needed to be more careful and less certain. They were all to blame.

  A former colleague in the audience began heckling him.

  “You are telling us fairy tales!” the man shouted. “You are lying!”

  “This is not a field court marshal,” Zeira replied. The war was not his fault alone, he said. No one had been willing to stare the most terrifying possibility—a full-scale invasion—in the face.

  But then, in a moment of reflection, Zeira conceded that he had made an error. He had ignored the seemingly impossible. He hadn’t thought through all the alternatives as deeply as he should.

  “I usually had a note in my pocket,” he told the audience, “and on that little note, it said, ‘and if not?’ ” The note was a talisman, a reminder that the desire to get something done, to be decisive, can also be a weakness. The note was supposed to prompt him to ask bigger questions.

  But in the days before the Yom Kippur War, “I didn’t read that little note,” Zeira said. “That was my mistake.”

  MANAGING OTHERS

  Solving a Kidnapping with Lean and Agile Thinking and a Culture of Trust

  Frank Janssen had just returned home from a bike ride when he heard a knock at the front door. It was a sunny Saturday morning; there were kids playing soccer a few blocks away. When Janssen looked out the window, he saw a woman holding a clipboard and two men dressed in khakis and button-down shirts. Perhaps they were conducting a survey? Or they were religious missionaries? Janssen didn’t know why they were on his doorstep, but he hoped it wouldn’t take more than a moment to shoo them away.

  When he opened the door, however, the men pushed their way inside. One of them grabbed Janssen, shoved him against the wall, and then threw him to the floor. He pulled a gun from his waistband and slammed the barrel across Janssen’s face. The other man pressed a stun gun against Janssen’s torso and pulled the trigger, momentarily paralyzing the sixty-three-year-old. Then they bound his hands with a plastic zip tie and carried him outside, into the backseat of a silver Nissan waiting in the driveway. The two men sat on either side of Janssen while the woman sat up front, next to the driver. As Janssen slowly regained control of his body, he began shoving his attackers. They pushed him to the floor and applied the stun gun again. The car backed onto the street and headed west, past the field where kids were playing soccer. One of the assailants draped a blanket over Janssen’s body. The vehicle turned onto a freeway and slipped into southbound traffic.*

  Janssen’s wife came home about an hour later and found the house empty and the front door ajar. Frank’s bike was propped against the garage. Maybe he had gone for a walk? An hour later, with no sign of him, his wife grew concerned. She searched the entryway, thinking he might have left a note. On the doorstep, she saw a few drops of blood. Panicked, she walked toward the driveway and found more blood outside. She phoned her daughter, who told her to call the police.

  Her husband, she explained to officers, was a consultant at a firm specializing in national security. Soon her home was surrounded by police cruisers and yellow crime-scene tape. Black SUVs pulled up, delivering a team of FBI agents who dusted for prints and photographed indentations in the grass. For the next two days, agents pored over Janssen’s cellphone records and interviewed neighbors and coworkers, but found nothing to indicate what was going on.

  Then, three days after the abduction, in the middle of the night of April 7, 2014, his wife’s phone buzzed. It was a series of text messages from an unfamiliar number with a New York City area code.

  We have your husband, the texts read, and he is in the trunk of a car going to California. If she contacted the police, we will send him back to you in 6 boxes and every chance we get we will take someone in you family to italy and torture them and kill them, we will do a drive by and gun down anybody in you family and we will throw grenades in you window.

  The texts also referenced Janssen’s daughter and a man named Kelvin Melton. Suddenly, things started making a bit more sense. Janssen’s daughter, Colleen, was an assistant district attorney in nearby Wake Forest, and she had prosecuted Melton, a high-ranking gang member in the Bloods, a few years earlier. Colleen had successfully sent Melton to jail for the rest of his life on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon. A theory began to emerge: Government investigators suspected that the Bloods had kidnapped Frank Janssen to punish his daughter. This was revenge for putting one of their leaders behind bars.

  Within hours, the police had subpoenaed the records of the phone sending the texts looking for a link with known gang members. They could tell the messages had been transmitted from Georgia, but the device was a burner, an unregistered phone bought with cash at a Walmart. There was nothing in the cellular records or purchase receipts that told investigators who owned the phone or where it was currently located.

  Two days later, another text arrived from a different number, this time with an Atlanta area code. Here is 2 picture of you husband, it read and included photos of Janssen tied to a chair. If you can not tell me where my things are at tomorrow i will start torchering colleen father. None of the investigators had any idea what “things” the kidnappers were referring to. The texts also demanded that someone bring Melton, the incarcerated gang leader, a pack of cigarettes, as well as other commands. Jefe wants his things and he needs to get another phone fast so we can finish our business and if I don’t get word from him very very fast then we have problems with his people. The police didn’t know if “Jefe” referred to Melton or someone else, or why Melton would want cigarettes delivered to him since he could buy them inside the Polk Correctional Institution. More texts arrived with references to un
known people. Now he know ah playin games, one said. Tell him we got franno, tell him he better find a way to tell me where my things at an get my money or we kill these people in 2 days. Investigators were confused by these mentions of “Jefe” and “Franno,” and the threats to kill multiple people even though authorities were aware of only one kidnapping victim. If this was a revenge plot, why were the kidnappers sending so many ambiguous messages? Why hadn’t they made any ransom demands? One federal agent thought the kidnappers were acting as if they weren’t sure what was going on themselves, as if they didn’t have a plan.

  The FBI asked Google to look for searches around the time of the abduction that had included Janssen’s address. The computer giant reported that someone using a disposable T-Mobile phone had Googled “Colleen Janssen address,” but what had come up was her parents’ home, where she had once lived. A new theory emerged: The kidnappers had intended to kidnap Colleen as revenge for prosecuting Kelvin Melton, but had accidentally grabbed her father.

  Investigators determined that the Georgia phone sending the latest texts was also a burner, but this time, when agents approached cellular companies, their records proved more fruitful. The texts had been sent from Atlanta. Moreover, the phone had recently received a call from another number, which had been sending and receiving texts with yet another phone that police were able to determine was located inside the walls of Polk Correctional itself. That phone had placed almost a hundred calls to Melton’s daughters.

  The kidnapping, investigators came to believe, was being directed by Melton himself.

  The FBI phoned Polk Correctional and told the warden to search Melton’s cell. When Melton saw guards approaching, he barricaded the door and smashed his phone to pieces. It would take days to recover data from the device.

  There was nothing the FBI could do to force Melton to cooperate with the investigators. He was already in prison for life. There was no additional information to be gleaned from any cellphone records. Agents had looked at surveillance tapes from the stores where the burner phones had been purchased and had scrutinized footage from cameras overlooking roads near Janssen’s house. None of it was helpful. The FBI had hundreds of pieces of information. There were numerous dots, but nothing to connect them.

  Some agents hoped the FBI’s new computer system, a piece of complex software named Sentinel, might help unearth connections they had overlooked. Others were more skeptical. More than a decade earlier, the bureau had started building technologies that officials had promised would provide powerful new tools for solving crimes. Most of those efforts, however, were failures. One notable effort was abandoned in 2005 after $170 million was spent creating a search engine that crashed constantly. Another attempt was suspended in 2010 after auditors concluded it would cost millions more simply to figure out why the system wasn’t working. A few years before Janssen was kidnapped, the agency’s databases were still so outdated that most agents didn’t even bother inputting the bulk of the information they collected during investigations. Instead, they used paper files and index cards, like their predecessors decades before.

  Then, in 2012, the bureau had rolled out Sentinel. Simply put, it was a system for sorting and managing evidence, clues, witness testimony, and the tens of thousands of other little pieces of information agents collected every day. Sentinel was tied into analytical engines and databases that the bureau and other law-enforcement agencies had developed to look for patterns. The software’s development had been overseen by a young man from Wall Street who had convinced the FBI to hire him by arguing that the bureau needed to draw on lessons from companies such as Toyota, and methods such as “lean manufacturing” and “agile programming.” He had promised he could get Sentinel working in less than two years with a handful of software engineers—and then he had delivered.

  Now Sentinel was functional. No one working on the Janssen case was certain if it would provide any help, but they were desperate. One of the agents began inputting each piece of information they had collected thus far, and then sat back to see if Sentinel would spit anything useful out.

  II.

  When Rick Madrid showed up for his job interview at the old General Motors plant, he wore mirrored shades, an Iron Maiden T-shirt, and a pair of cutoff jeans he had once described as “the greatest aphrodisiac in Northern California.” It was 1984. Out of courtesy toward his interviewers—and because Madrid wanted this job—he had combed his beard and put on deodorant. He drew the line, however, at wearing sleeves that covered his tattoos.

  Madrid was familiar with the plant in Fremont, California, because he had worked there until two years earlier, when GM had shut it down. Fremont was known, locally and nationally, as the worst auto factory in the world. Eight hours a day for twenty-seven years, Madrid had pounded rims into place with a sledgehammer, proselytized about the greatness of the United Auto Workers, and served rounds of “magic screwdrivers,” a high-octane mixture of vodka and orange juice that he poured into plastic cups wedged into car frames so coworkers could partake as the vehicles progressed down the line. Fremont’s assembly conveyors always moved smoothly, so the drinks hardly ever spilled. The bags of ice he put in the vehicles’ trunks often warped the liners, but that was the problem of whoever bought the car. “Work was an interruption in my leisure time,” Madrid later said. “I was there to earn money. I really didn’t care about the quality of the job and neither did GM. They just wanted to get as many cars out as they could.”

  When Madrid showed up for this interview, however, he suspected things might be different this time. GM was partnering with the Japanese automaker Toyota to reopen the Fremont plant. For Toyota, this was a chance to build cars inside the United States and expand the company’s sales in America. For General Motors, it was an opportunity to learn about the famed “Toyota Production System,” which was producing cars of very high quality at very low costs in Japan. One hitch in the partnership was that GM’s agreement with the UAW dictated that the plant had to hire at least 80 percent of its workers from employees who had been laid off two years earlier. So Madrid and his friends were showing up, one by one, to interview with New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc., or NUMMI.

  Madrid figured he was a good candidate because his on-the-job drinking, truth be told, was tame compared to the antics of his former colleagues. Yes, he may have gotten drunk and had sex in the warehouse where they stored Chevy seats, but unlike many of his coworkers, he didn’t snort coke while attaching brake pads or smoke weed from bongs built from muffler parts. He hadn’t been a patron of the parking-lot RV where prostitutes offered services perfectly timed to union-mandated work breaks. Nor had Madrid ever deliberately sabotaged a vehicle like those who put empty whiskey bottles and loose screws behind door panels so they would bang around after the cars were sold.

  The saboteurs were an extreme example of a fierce war that had consumed the Fremont plant in the GM days. Workers weren’t above dirty tactics if they thought it would strengthen their union’s hand. Employees knew that as long as they kept the assembly line moving, no one was likely to get punished for misbehavior, no matter how egregious. At GM, all that really mattered was keeping production on pace. Employees sometimes discovered mistakes on cars as they moved along the conveyor belt, but rather than stop and fix the problems, they would mark the vehicle with a wax crayon or a Post-it note and let it continue on its way. Eventually, those fully assembled autos would be hauled into the back lot and taken apart to repair the error. Once, a worker had a heart attack and fell into the pit as a car passed over; everyone waited for the vehicle to rumble along before they pulled him out. They all knew the plant’s fundamental law: The line doesn’t stop.

  Madrid’s first interview occurred in a small conference room. Across the table was a representative from the UAW, two Toyota executives from Japan, and a GM manager. Everyone exchanged pleasantries. They asked Madrid about his background and gave him some basic math and assembly problems to test his knowledge of auto manufactur
ing. They asked if he intended to drink while working. No, he said, he was done with that. It was a relatively brief conversation. Then, as he was walking out, one of the men from Japan asked Madrid what he had disliked about the plant when he worked there last time.

  Rick Madrid had never been shy about speaking his mind. He didn’t like working on cars he knew had problems, he told them, because whatever he was doing would have to be undone to repair a mistake. He didn’t like that his suggestions were always ignored by his superiors. Once, he said, when a new tire mounting machine was being installed, he had come up with an idea for putting the controls in a different place to speed up work. He even sought out an engineer to show him a diagram of the concept. But when he came back from lunch, the new machine was in place with the controls in their original location. “I operated from the left side of the tire machine, all the controls were on the right side,” he told the interviewers. “Thank goodness that engineer didn’t build bridges.”

  When the plant was run by GM, workers were just cogs in a machine, Madrid told them. “You were just there to do what they told you to do,” he said. Nobody ever asked him his opinion or cared what he thought.

  He expressed all these frustrations to his interviewers and then kicked himself on the long drive home. He really needed this job. He should have kept his mouth shut.

  A few days later, Madrid got the call. The Japanese executives had appreciated his honesty and were offering him a job. First, though, he would have to go to Japan for two weeks and learn about the Toyota Production System. Sixteen days later, NUMMI flew Madrid and about two dozen other workers to the Takaoka auto plant outside Toyota City, Japan, the first in a series of trips nearly every employee at NUMMI would take. When Madrid walked into the Japanese factory, he saw familiar assembly lines and heard the recognizable sounds of pneumatic tools hissing and buzzing. Why had they bothered flying him across the world to train inside a factory just like the one at home? After a basic tour and an orientation meeting, Madrid walked onto the factory floor and watched one man put bolts into doorframes, over and over, with an air-powered gun. By the time each car rolled off the line, Madrid knew, those bolts would be buried under layers of metal and plastic. It was just like California, except the signs were in Japanese and the bathrooms were much cleaner.