Corner Office: Daniel Lubetzky: Daniel Lubetzky of Kind Snacks, on Reaching Multiple Goals

Q. Were you an entrepreneur early on?

A. I did magic shows, probably from the time I was 8 through 19. When I was a college student, I paid for my travels doing magic shows from the streets of Paris to the streets of Bulgaria.

Q. You’re the third C.E.O. I’ve interviewed who’s a former magician. What’s the correlation?

A. First of all, magicians practice a lot. It requires a lot of discipline. Second, you can’t be afraid to be a leader, to go on stage, and you learn to have presence. You need to be able to visualize and connect and create. Most important, you learn to think outside the box.

Q. What about your parents’ influence?

A. My father was larger than life to me. He was a Holocaust survivor, and when the war ended he went to Mexico to reunite with two of his uncles. He had only a third-grade education but would buy used encyclopedias and read them cover to cover. He was a natural entrepreneur. He started from nothing and built a little jewelry shop. He eventually started duty-free businesses. I learned a lot just from watching him.

Q. Tell me about your leadership style.

A. I’m very inquisitive. I love hanging around people who can teach me. I ask a lot of questions. And I’m very introspective and self-critical. I try hard to always question myself and wonder: “What could I have done better? What did I do wrong?” The culture at our company is to be self-critical, but you have to balance that as a leader with praise for your team.

Q. What else?

A. We talk a lot about “and, not but,” which is about challenging people’s compromises. It is true that sometimes you have to choose this or that, but many times those are false choices. Our brains help us take shortcuts to be efficient, but sometimes the assumptions you take as givens — to help make decisions quickly — are no longer true or have always been false. It’s important to ask: “What do I want to achieve and what’s stopping it? Is there a way to have my cake and eat it?” It’s about being creative.

Q. How do you hire?

A. I ask a lot of questions and I listen to make sure that everything is consistent, because people can be very good at interviewing. They can sound great but you really have to get to know them and understand them and connect things.

I rely heavily on references. The art of a reference check is aligning a candidate’s interest with yours and making sure the reference understands that. You don’t want the person you’re interviewing to come work for you and fail, so you really want to impress that upon the reference.

Reference checks are also an enormous opportunity to strengthen the person if you do hire them — to understand how to get the most out of that person, especially if you’re hiring somebody very senior. You learn about their strengths and weaknesses, so they’re much more likely to have a faster ramp-up and succeed.

I also have strong opinions about the concept of letting people go. There are corporate environments where a person has dedicated their life to working hard, and then they’re fired with a security person escorting them out the door. I find that so demeaning and disrespectful. There are times and places for that, like if somebody is intentionally doing something wrong. And none of what I’m saying has to do with tolerating mediocrity.

But a vast majority of people who work have the best intentions, and sometimes they don’t fit with the work. So if you took the time to hire them and to put them in that situation, and they’re doing their best but just not working out, I think the best practice is to do a few things:

No. 1: Maximum communication, because if you communicate with the person and have constructive criticism early, you might prevent a lot of issues. A lot of problems happen because the manager doesn’t address them, and then it’s too late.

No. 2: If things are not working, set a plan. You have a 30-day plan, a 60-day plan. Hopefully, they get on the right course. If they don’t, maybe it’s just that that particular job doesn’t fit them. So can you move them to another part of the organization? You should have done enough work during the hiring process to determine if the person has your values and your work ethic, but maybe the skill set is not aligned with their job. So can you find another one for them?

Try that first, and if that doesn’t work out, then at that time come up with an elegant way for them to transition out. And we have a different model for that. As long as it’s not someone who has bad intentions — they’re doing their best but you’ve just determined that they need to be doing something else — it’s much better for them to start looking for another job while they’re employed. But they’re also going to help us find the person who will replace them and help train them.

And by the way, in exchange for this culture of us never treating somebody badly, we have an expectation of our employees that they can’t just walk out because they decide to. Everyone is a stockholder, and ownership carries responsibilities. You need to give a minimum of 60 days’ notice if you’re departing. With my direct reports, I require two years. In exchange, I’m blindly loyal to them.

Q. What career advice would you give to a class of graduating seniors?

A. The most important is to make sure that you talk to yourself, that you think hard about what’s important to you and gives you meaning. When I was 19 and walking between classes, I didn’t have a phone, so my brain would take me in different directions. And it’s so healthy and important to be thinking, “Oh, I could have done that better.” Or, “What about this idea?” But nowadays, we’re on our iPhones all the time, and you don’t have time to talk with yourself, to analyze.

It’s very important for people to know what gives them meaning. But it’s hard for people to figure out if you’re not connecting with yourself and taking the time to just be introspective and daydream.

Bucks: Six Tips for Setting Your Financial Goals

Carl Richards

Carl Richards is a certified financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at BAM Advisor Services. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published this year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

If you managed to get unstuck and created your personal balance sheet recently, then you should have a really clear idea of where you are today. The next questions you need to be address are these: Where do you want to go? What are your financial goals?

This can be a frustrating process, since it involves making some really important decisions under extreme uncertainty. None of us know what next week will look like, let alone where we will be in 30 years. On top of that, making financial goals involves a whole bunch of assumptions — guesses, really.

We have to guess what our 60- or 80-year-old self will want to do. We have to guess what the markets will do, where interest rates will be and how much we can save. Those reasons and many more often lead us to forget that this is a process. We get stuck, unsure what to do next.

Well, despite all the uncertainty and assumptions, we need to have goals. It reminds me of the conversation between Alice and the Cheshire Cat:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where,” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“— so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

But the problem is that we do care where we end up, and part of deciding where to go depends on setting goals.

So there are a few really important things to keep in mind here. Before you get too excited or frustrated, here are a few things to consider.

1. These are guesses. 

While it is important to admit these are guesses, you should still make them the best guesses you can. Be specific. Just saying, “I want to save for college for my kids,” isn’t enough. How about, “I’ll find $100 to add to a specific 529 account on the 15th of each month”?

Even though you need to be specific, give yourself permission to be flexible. An attitude of flexibility goes a long way toward dealing with uncertainty. There is something very powerful about having specific goals but not obsessing about them.

2. These goals will change.

It’s a continuing process, and it will change because life changes. But don’t let this knowledge stop you from doing it. You need to start somewhere.

3. Think of these goals as the destination on a trip.

You would never spend a bunch of time and energy worrying about whether you should take a car, train or plane without first deciding where you are going. Yet we spend countless hours researching the merits of one investment over another before we even decide on our goals. Why are you stressing about what stocks to pick if you don’t have goals in mind?

4. Prioritize these goals.

Once you have them all written down, rank each goal in terms of importance and urgency. Sometimes you will have to deal with something that is urgent, like paying off a credit card bill, so you can move on to something really important, like saving for retirement.

5. This is a process.

If you set goals and then forget about them forever, that is a worthless event. This is a process. Since we’ve given ourselves permission to change our assumptions about the future as more information becomes available, we need to do it. Part of the process of planning involves revisiting your goals periodically to see how you are doing and making course corrections when needed.

6. Let go!

As important as it is to regularly review your progress, it’s also very important to let go of the need to obsess over your goals. Define where you want to go, review your goals at set times, and in between, let go of them! Goals for the future are important, but so is living today. Find that balance.

This list may not seem like a big deal, but you would be surprised at the number of people who cannot tell you their goals, let alone break them down into categories or rank their priority. Once you have your goals, you will be able to move on to the next step: making a plan.

Shortcuts: The Perils of Setting Goals

Whether it be swimming with dolphins (an oddly common choice), writing a book, trekking through Nepal or all three, it’s not that the ideas are inherently bad. Rather, it is already too easy to reduce lives to a series of goals that we aim for, reach and then move on.

But goals are good, right? Aren’t we always told they’re the best way to get to where we want to be?

It turns out that that’s not necessarily true, personally and professionally.

I’ll get back to the bucket lists in a bit. But first, let’s look at what some of the research tells us about goals.

“We know goal-setting is a very powerful motivating force,” said Maurice E. Schweitzer, a professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Whether it’s a runner who wants to set a certain time or a salesperson aiming for a number of sales, goals give us meaning, purpose and guidance.”

But, said Professor Schweitzer, who co-wrote a paper in 2009 “Goals Gone Wild,” which appeared in the journal Academy of Management Perspectives, things got a little out of hand.

“The proponents of goals focused on the benefits of the goals, not the harm, and too many businesses went too far, saying ‘Here’s what we want you to accomplish,’ and implicitly saying, ‘We don’t care how you got there.’ ”

And that, he said, can lead to, among other things, unethical behavior.

Lisa D. Ordóñez, a professor of management and organizations at the Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, described experiments that proved this point. In one, participants were asked to create as many words as possible using letters — sort of like the game Boggle. In one group, the participants were given a goal of nine words, and if met, they would receive some money. In a second group, they were given a goal but no financial incentive. And those in the third group were simply told to try their best.

The students who participated were given a chance to check their words in a dictionary to make sure they were true English words. They threw out the worksheets, and turned in the answer sheet that only stated how many words they had finished.

But the academic researchers running the experiment had a code to match the worksheets with the answer sheets and discovered that both groups that had been given a goal of creating a certain number of words — whether or not money was involved — cheated 8 to 13 percent of the time. Those in the third group rarely did.

“It’s not that goals are bad,” said Professor Ordóñez, who was also a co-author of the “Goals Gone Wild” article. “We’re just saying be careful.”

For example, a lot has been written about tying teachers’ merit pay or jobs to how well their students do on standardized tests. The goal is to find a way to evaluate teachers’ abilities. But this has led to a number of problems, including, in some cases, teachers cheating to raise students’ scores.

“Part of the larger problem is, How do we measure performance?” she said. “We want to put our money where we are better served — I get that. But what we end up measuring is not always the most important thing but the easiest to measure.”

Gary P. Latham, a professor of organizational effectiveness at the University of Toronto, has long studied the positive effects of goals. It’s not that goals are bad, he said, but that problems arise when the values that underlie them and the process to achieve them are skewed.

“If you’re going to be overly reductionist, then you’re behaving stupidly,” he said. “You can have multiple goals for complex behavior.”

Professor Schweitzer agreed that it’s a problem when goals become too narrowly focused.