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Working from the perspective of the resource‐based view of strategy, this paper addresses whether academics, consultants, and other sources of general managerial prescriptions can affect firms' long‐run rent streams. The answer is affirmative. To demonstrate this, I discuss the use of motivational techniques as a well‐understood and common managerial choice that may affect a firm's chance of generating rents. This paper interprets extant empirical research on goal setting and discusses the conceptualization of temporal rent patterns. I build upon an empirical finding in goal‐setting research to compare the temporal patterns of rents for managerial choices embedded in path‐dependent vs. path‐independent processes. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.