“Stretch goals are very useful,” says David Bach, a German-born professor at the Yale University School of Management. “Precisely because they generate a lot of pressure, you have to make sure they are coupled with a clear sense of what the boundaries are.
Volkswagen’s global ambitions had bumped up against the laws of physics. As Volkswagen later admitted in court documents, its specialists were not able to reconcile the conflicting goals of fuel economy and emissions “within the allocated time frame and budget.” An engineer who was involved in development of the new motor put it more bluntly. “It was a bad plan,”