keymodels
BHAG
How can bhag support strategic choice or positioning?
Contents
Every organisation benefits from a commonly understood, organisation-wide long-term goal.
A shared long-term ambition can focus an entire organisation. James Collins and Jerry Porras called such an ambition a BHAG—a “big hairy audacious goal”—in Built to Last. A BHAG gives people one vivid destination beyond incremental improvement. When developing it alongside Collins’s later “hedgehog concept,” examine what the organisation cares deeply about, what it could become the best in the world at and what drives its economic engine. The intersection helps ground an inspiring future direction.
When to use it
Use a BHAG when the organisation needs a long-range destination that can align activity, guide decisions and motivate coordinated effort. It asks what the company’s next consequential leap should be and gives the organisation a purposeful, positive view of the future.
Ground a bold ambition in three overlapping questions.
Select a circle or the shared intersection to see why an inspiring destination needs commitment, capability, and an economic engine.
Grounded future direction
The overlap tests whether a candidate ambition is meaningful, advantage-based, and economically supportable.
- Relationship
- Overlap of 3 questions
The overlap is useful because ambition is tested against commitment, distinctive capability, and economic sustainability at the same time.
Generate several candidate ambitions, test each against all three questions, and state the new capability and sustained commitment required.
Origins
James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras introduced the term in their 1994 book Built to Last, based on research into enduring “visionary” companies. Their nineteen ninety-six Harvard Business Review article “Building Your Company’s Vision” developed the idea further and distinguished a ten-to-thirty-year BHAG from an organisation’s enduring core ideology.
What it is
A Big Hairy Audacious Goal is a concrete, compelling ambition intended to focus and energise an organisation for many years. Collins and Porras describe four broad forms: a quantified target, the defeat of a common enemy, emulation of a role model and a major internal transformation. The goal should demand capabilities the organisation does not yet possess while remaining specific enough for people to know whether it has been accomplished.
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