What's Your BHAG (bee-hag)? - Austin American Marketing Association

I am upbeat. When it rains, I get energized. I don’t see the gray skies, I see rain greening my grass. As marketing and advertising professionals, there’s a choice to make: either we make it rain or we turn off the spigots.

Let it rain. Is your marketing budget cut? Get creative – mix it up by reaching into the toolkits of low cost, guerilla marketing and interactive marketing techniques. This blog will explore those methods and more with real-life examples from industry veterans.

But first thing’s first. Refresh your thinking with just one exercise today: write down your company’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal (“BHAG” said as “bee-hag”). I just beg you to absolutely not call a meeting to do this. Group think kills BHAGs. It’s best done as an individual exercise.

Why do I think it’s time for a BHAG? Short-term profit seeking is trouble with a capital “T”. When authors James Collins and Jerry Porras coined the term Big Hairy Audacious Goal in their 1996 article entitled “Building Your Company’s Vision,” they wrote that the BHAG is “…an audacious 10-to-30-year goal to progress towards an envisioned future.”

When your vision is big, it unites your team, lifts morale, and fuels progressive actions. Collins and Porras turned their article into a bestselling book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. Here is a sampling of the BHAGs they collected from tech companies. (Remember that the timeframe is the mid-90s.)

• Google: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
• IBM: Commit to a $5 billion gamble on the 360; meet the emerging need of our customers.
• Microsoft: “A computer on every desk and in every home.”
• Motorola: Invent a way to sell 100,000 TVs at $179.95; Attain six-sigma quality; win the Baldridge Award; launch Iridiums.
• Sony: Change the worldwide image of Japanese products as poor quality; create a pocketable transistor radio.
• Nokia Siemens Networks: Connecting 5 billion people by 2015.

Now that we’ve had a decade to look back on these BHAGS, what are your comments on these visionary goals? Right, not every company attains their BHAGS. But the alternative, no Big Hairy Audacious Goal to strive for – is to curse gray skies instead of see the green grass.

Want an easy focus group to test your BHAG? Post it in the comments for feedback. May your life be blessed with sales revenue.