Recording Your BHAG®

Document your BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) to share the 10-25 year goal that stretches your company to achieve greatness.

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What BHAG Is & Why It Matters

Your BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) is a 10-25 year goal that stretches your company to achieve greatness. The concept is from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras.

Your BHAG should connect with both the Head and Heart of your organization. Head: Alignment and Focus to achieve a single goal. Heart: Emotion that makes us proud and happy to do our work.

A BHAG should be a huge, daunting challenge for a company - like climbing Mount Everest.

A true BHAG is clear and compelling, serves as a unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a 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. A BHAG engages people—it reaches out and grabs them. It is tangible, energizing, highly focused. People get it right away; it takes little or no explanation.

Understanding your BHAG will help you to say "Yes" to the right decisions and "No" to the rest. A good BHAG will provide focus and alignment to your organization. It will enable innovation and success in a way that is not possible otherwise.

How to Record Your BHAG

Note: If you don’t see BHAG in the left menu, you don’t have permission to edit this for your company. You can read them in the Strategy Summary.

Under Strategy, choose BHAG in the left menu.
If you’ve already filled in your Core Purpose, you’ll see it on the screen. If not, click in the top text box to add your Core Purpose. The text will automatically save if you click out of the box, or you can hit Save when you’re done.
Next, fill in what you believe your company has the potential to be best in the world at doing.
Then, think about what drives your company’s financial engine, your profit/x.
These three boxes make up what Collins called your “Hedgehog” and will help you think about your Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
Finally, click to edit the text in the BHAG box to record your inspirational goal for the company for the next 10-25 years.
You can click to edit the text and add Comments or Attachments as needed.

TIP: When writing your BHAG, include when you expect to achieve it and how you'll measure it's done. Follow the format, "By xx date, we will achieve yy as measured by zz."