Big Hairy Audacious Goal

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All businesses set objectives or goals that describe what they hope to accomplish over the coming days, months or years. These goals help align employees of the business to work together more effectively. Often these goals are very tactical, such as "achieve 10% revenue growth in the next 3 months."

The phrase Big Hairy Audacious Goal ("BHAG") was proposed by James Collins and Jerry Porras in their 1996 article entitled Building Your Company's Vision. A BHAG encourages companies to define visionary goals that are more strategic.

In the article, the authors define a BHAG (BEE-hag) as a form of vision statement "...an audacious 10-to-30-year goal to progress towards an envisioned future."

A true BHAG is clear and compelling, serves as unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a clear catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines.

—Collins and Porras, 1996

Collins and Porras also used this concept in their book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies.

In this book they have taken 18 visionary companies and studied them, and also studied 18 comparison companies. Collins is also the author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't a management book that aims to describe how some companies transition from good to great and why others fail to make the transition.

BHAG(s) to Stimulate Progress:

• Google: Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.^[1]
• Boeing: Bet the pot on the B-17, 707 and 747.
• IBM: Commit to a $5 billion gamble on the 360; meet the emerging need of our customers.
• Ford: "Democratize the automobile."
• Microsoft: "A computer on every desk and in every home."^[2]
• Motorola: Invent a way to sell 100,000 TVs at $179.95; Attain six-sigma quality; win the Baldridge Award; launch Iridiums.
• Philip Morris: Slay Goliath and become the front-runner in the tobacco industry, despite the social forces against smoking.
• Sony: Change the worldwide image of Japanese products as poor quality; create a pocketable transistor radio.
• Disney: Build Disneyland - and build it to our image, not industry standards. To be the best company in the world for all fields of family entertainment.
• Nokia Siemens Networks: Connecting 5 billion people by 2015.
• Symbian: To become the most widely used operating system in the world.
• Amazon: Every book, ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.
• Amazon: Earth's most customer centric company.
• Twitter: To become "the pulse of the planet."^[3]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Company Overview, Google.com
2. ^ Microsoft's Tradition of Innovation, Microsoft.com
3. ^ "Twitter's Internal Strategy Laid Bare", "TechCrunch.com"

[edit] References

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2007)

• Collins, J. & Porras, J. (1996) Building Your Company's Vision, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 74, Iss. 5, pp65–77.
• Collins, J. & Porras, J. (1994, 1997, 2002) Built To Last, pp113.