BHAG
Definition
A BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) is a single clear goal set ten to twenty-five years out, ambitious enough that reaching it looks improbable on the day it is written. The term comes from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in Built to Last (1994); Scaling Up adopts it as the long-horizon anchor at the top of the One-Page Strategic Plan.
Collins and Porras describe four shapes a BHAG can take: a quantitative or qualitative target, a common-enemy goal, a role-model goal, and an internal transformation. Whichever shape it takes, it has to be sayable in one sentence and have a finish line that needs no explanation — Kennedy's 1961 commitment to land a man on the moon before the decade was out is the canonical illustration. The authors describe the intended feel as roughly a 50 to 70 percent chance of success. A BHAG earns its place only if the three-to-five-year targets below it are visibly back-cast from it.
Two failure modes are common and they look opposite. One is a BHAG so abstract that no decision in any quarter could ever contradict it. The other is today's growth rate extended out twenty years, which is a forecast in costume. A long-horizon goal that would change nothing about next quarter's choices is not doing the work the horizon exists for.
Example
A $12M field-service platform set 'support one million working technicians by 2042'. Back-cast: 100,000 technicians by year five, 14,000 by the end of next year, and a current quarter aimed at cutting activation time from 11 days to 4.
See also: Scaling Up software