If you accept these postulates as true: * on a long enough time horizon, companies must either adapt to their environment by changing their product, or they mus

If you accept these postulates as true: * on a long enough time horizon, companies must either adapt to their environment by changing their product, or they must cease to exist. * a changing product means changing the abilities required to deliver that product at some level * changing the abilities required to deliver that product means the humans must change as well then you have to conclude: On a long enough time horizon, the humans must change their own abilities to match the changing requirements of the product, or the company will go bankrupt. Now, given that conclusion: you are correct, goal-setting is not required. And we have evidence that it is not required in companies that mostly outsource technical labor on an as-needed basis rather than set goals to continually realign employees with company objectives. In some way, you have to choose an approach for calibrating changing employees and changing company objectives. Goal-setting is a low friction approach for calibration when the company prefers employees with internal domain knowledge over time. There are plenty of other approaches for aligning needs and available labor as well, but they are generally not preferred by both companies and individuals which is why you see the prevalence of this approach.