Many less successful businesses set goals that describe what they hope to accomplish over the coming days, months or years. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal. A true BHAG acts as a clear catalyst for team spirit. They had an organisation-wide goal which was clear and compelling, likely to be externally questionable, but not internally regarded as impossible.
Collins defined a BHAG as “…an audacious 10-to-30-year goal to progress towards an envisioned future.” These hugely successful companies all had a focus on a single focal point of medium-long term effort. In the corporate context, Jim Collin’s described inspiring goals as Big Hairy Audacious Goals in his classic book Built to Last, which was about the patterns found in the most successful companies over the long term. The human mind has the capacity to automatically prioritise what is important if the goal is large enough and well defined.īig thinking can both galvanise your own thoughts and actions, and those of your team.
The bigger the goal, the more trivial is anything that might slow us down, and we can more swiftly provide solutions. If we are stretching for something rather than coasting towards something, we are naturally going to achieve more, and get further, in less time. People who achieve big avoid this thinking by setting themselves big goals. The downside is lowering our goals to an ‘achievable’ level we know we can easily meet, thereby lowering our expectations, our standards, and our outcomes. If we underestimate what we can achieve in the long term, we underestimate our true capability. There is an interesting quote from Tony Robbins that I like that is quite relevant to this idea, “Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year – and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!” It is about being open-minded, positive, creative and seeing opportunity in the big picture. ‘Thinking big’ means being able to dream and visualise what you can achieve on an audacious scale: with no limits on your thinking. To me the ability to ‘Think BIG’ is one of the cornerstones of extreme success. “If you’re going to be thinking, you may as well think big.”
0 kommentar(er)
