How to Set (and Actually Achieve) that Ever-Elusive BHAG

On September 12, 1962, roughly 40,000 people packed into Houston’s Rice Stadium to hear a young president announce the most famous BHAG in history. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade, not because it is easy. But because it is hard," John F. Kennedy said to the crowd.

That's the line everyone remembers. His next words reveal even more about the human desire to pursue what is just out of reach. JFK continued, reasoning that even apart from international competition and human accomplishment, goals like these "serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."

If JFK's words had inspired empty applause and not action, you wouldn't be reading about this right now. This phrase could have been laminated and posted on a wall somewhere, as is frequently the case with corporate BHAGs, and no one would have thought twice about it.

Yes, the first step is to say it out loud or write it down. What you do after sets everything else in motion and determines whether your BHAG is a short-term chest puffer or a declaration of dogged intent. What comes next? Laying out an actionable, realistic, incremental and measurable plan to achieve it.

First, a quick systems check

The term BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, pronounced bee-hag) comes from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, who studied enduringly great companies in Built to Last. A true BHAG, in Collins' framing, is a 10-to-25-year goal that's clear, compelling, and grabs people in the gut. It has a measurable, concrete finish line. It requires total dedication and a quantum leap in organizational capability. For the same reason people choose to climb Mount Everest, deciding on a BHAG and making it happen is one of the most fulfilling experiences a human can have.

The most important ingredient to a bona fide BHAG is uncertainty. People don't get excited about scaling a five-foot hill of sand because they already know they could do it. It's not hairy or audacious. According to Collins, the ideal BHAG carries around a 50% to 70% chance of success. A built-in failure probability isn't something that naturally appeals to most people in the energy and industrial fields, but that makes it even more important.

So what does a BHAG look like in the energy and industrial space? Let’s start with what it doesn’t look like. "Grow revenue 10% year over year" is a 5 o’clock shadow of a goal. A big, hairy AUDACIOUS idea doesn’t have to start with something that’s never been done before, but it does need to scare you a little bit. 

We’re talking more in the arena of: “Pioneer subsea carbon storage at commercial scale by 2035,” “run the first fully electrified offshore fleet in the industry by 2050,” or “decommission at least 75% of abandoned wells in the Gulf by 2040.” Something with a finish line you can point to and demands capabilities you don’t have yet, but is technically doable. Hot tip: if people aren’t raising their eyebrows when you say it out loud, you might be selling yourself short. 

Why audacity can feel like a hairy situation

Professionals in the energy and industrial spaces are flush with ambition. These are companies that drill through miles of rock, electrify remote facilities, and decommission offshore platforms the size of skyscrapers. The appetite for hard things is real. So why do BHAGs stall?

1. Chasing the unknown carries risk.

Often, the friction stems from culture rather than ambition. Industrial organizations are engineered to remove uncertainty. Between stage gates, HAZOPs, safety cases and FEED studies, most energy and industrial companies are full of people who've built entire careers on driving failure probability to zero. Then leadership unveils a goal deliberately designed with a 30% to 50% chance of missing, and every operational instinct in the building files it under "unrealistic."

2. People have been burned before.

It sounds like pessimism, but it's backed by logic and lived experience. Oxford megaproject researcher Bent Flyvbjerg spent decades studying billion-dollar capital projects and distilled the pattern into what he calls the iron law of megaprojects: over budget, over time, under benefits, over and over again. 

His data show that nine out of 10 large projects blow their budgets, with overruns of 50% or more entirely common. It’s a pattern that has held for decades across every continent and sector. Anyone who's delivered capital projects for a living has watched grand promises miss first oil by two years. 

3. BHAGs can be associated with delusion.

Setting BHAGs also carries stigma. According to Harvard Business Review, audacious targets are widely misunderstood and widely misused. The organizations best positioned to successfully bag a BHAG (those with recent wins and slack resources) are less likely to set them than struggling businesses, which often grasp for a moonshot in desperation and fall short.

4. Organizations aren't aligned under one BHAG.

Another common reason BHAGs fail in B2B business? A 10-to-25-year goal has to outlive price cycles, leadership changes, and often at least one rebrand. But because many BHAGs only exist in boardrooms, marketing teams recycle campaigns, sales teams chase last quarter's numbers, and service teams don’t even know a goal was set. 

Research from McKinsey states that roughly 70% of transformations fail because leaders never build conviction across the organization or craft a narrative people can rally behind. 

Tenacity is engineered

A risk-averse, stage-gated, verify-everything engineering culture might make it more challenging to actually set a BHAG. But when it comes to follow-through, your team is stacked. The same discipline that took Apollo from a speech in a Houston stadium to boots on the Sea of Tranquility in under seven years required roughly 400,000 committed people working from a single integrated plan.

The companies that achieve BHAGs treat them as scope. Kennedy's forgotten clause was the whole playbook: a goal that organizes and measures. The lesson? Run your BHAG the way you'd run your most important capital project. We’re taking a few points from our own Growth Engine to demonstrate that no goal is too audacious, hairy, or risky when you have a system engineered to carry it. 

1. Be realistic about your starting point.

Collins insists a BHAG must sit at the intersection of what you can be best at, what drives your economics and what you're passionate about. Yes, ask yourself what would be an accomplishment for your company and industry, but most importantly, make sure your BHAG is something you personally want to put in the extra mile for. 

On a more practical note, pressure-test your BHAG against real-world evidence. Run a competitor analysis to find the whitespace no one else can claim, benchmark your capabilities honestly against the leaders, and ask your customers and stakeholders what they believe you're best at. More often than not, their answer won’t be in your company deck. 

2. Pass the Mount Everest test.

Decades of goal-setting research by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham show that specific, difficult goals consistently outperform vague or easy ones. Clearly define your finish line with no abstract language or room for interpretation. The road to accomplishing your BHAG will get difficult. Ambiguity provides excuses to stop short and cut corners. 

A useful test: can a field technician repeat the goal word for word and know instantly whether the company hit it? If the answer is no, keep working. Find a sentence to summarize the goal that everyone can understand and get behind. 

3. Break it into work packages.

Goals paired with specific if-then plans (when, where, how) have a higher success rate. If we're keeping this conversation space-themed, the moon landing was the natural progression of other programs. Mercury proved a human could survive in orbit, and Gemini oriented astronauts with the technical skills a moon landing would demand. Apollo was only possible because of other milestones. 

Give your BHAG base camps: persona-specific targets, annual goals, and quarterly deliverables. Then assign each one a single accountable owner.

4. Put the narrative to work.

The "compelling why" that's missing from most failed transformations can't be whittled down to one town hall slide. People commit to goals they hear about often and understand deeply, so your BHAG has to show up everywhere your company speaks. For instance, a website that confidently presents your direction, thought leadership that presents quantifiable progress and obstacles to come, and sales conversations that connect it to the deal on the table.

As we’ve touched on, aiming bigger and shooting for the stars is part of our human DNA. Don’t be afraid to tell your story and goals and invite stakeholders, prospects, and talent to become a part of them. 

5. Instrument everything.

Another key point on success: Goals without feedback lose their power. Our MarTech enablement & automation tools connect HubSpot, CRM and analytics into always-on dashboards that track marketing signals alongside operational ones. Share of voice, brand strength, pipeline velocity and customer sentiment tell you whether the market believes your story, how far you are from achieving it and how you can get there faster. 

6. Commission, celebrate, re-baseline.

One day, when you finally hit your BHAG, all the momentum gained can evaporate if you don’t have a plan afterward. Wrapping up a massive milestone is something to stop and be proud of, but if it’s the only summit on your radar, your company may descend into complacency. Capture the results, the lessons learned, and the capabilities you didn't have when you started, then find the next mountain. 

Make it fly. 

The moon landing was a triumph of imagination—and a triumph of integration. 400,000 people, thousands of contractors and one clear finish line, all organized and measured against a single goal announced down the road from our office.

It doesn’t happen with a poster, a pizza party, or a bold, one-off social media post. It’s the calculated result of a system engineered to carry you the distance. 

At HexaGroup, we help energy and industrial firms build Growth Engines that connect brand, marketing, sales and service into one integrated machine, so bold goals turn into real progress.

Got a mountain in mind? Let's engineer the climb.