There is something troubling about the eight lofty “Millennium Development Goals” set by the United Nations in 2000 for 2015, which period is now at midpoint and thus up for review, but your treatment of the subject only accentuates the feeling (“The Eight Commandments,” July 7, 2007). Halving poverty and hunger in fifteen years, for instance, sounds quite commendable, but it is far from a commandment, as you cheerfully call it. Only imagine commandments that specified halving the killing, reducing the stealing by a third, or quartering the coveting of neighbors’ wives. Most of the UN’s goals suffer from treacherous precision of this ilk. And I am not harking back to some theological nostrum of untold longevity. All I am doing is returning to one of the sound management principles introduced by W. Edwards Deming two generations ago: eliminate management by objectives, for it will always misguide you by making you unnecessarily complacent or by making you struggle in vain. Instead, improve your performance continually and forever. With careful rephrasing, the “Millennium Development Goals” could go much farther in helping this world. As well as the UN.