From vision to action: making your BHAG a reality

Summary: Strategy is built on vision, and your vision comes down to three key components: your purpose, your values, and your BHAG. So… what’s next? How do you turn that vision into action? By methodically breaking it down into missions—each with plans and tactics, cadence, and performance measurement.

A mission with vision

On September 12, 1962, on a warm, sunny day in Houston, Texas, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech to a crowd of about 40,000 people, at Rice University’s Rice Stadium.

President Kennedy shared his vision of sending a crewed spacecraft to land on the moon and return home safely in that speech.

Seven years and eleven missions later, that vision was realized when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their Apollo Lunar Module on the moon and went for a walk.

Now I’m no scientist, but I can posture there were a lot of breakthroughs that needed to happen to pull that strategy off. We know there were challenges, including the cabin fire in Apollo 1 that killed the entire crew. At the time, the U.S. was under pressure to win the space race, as the USSR had already launched a satellite and put Yuri Gagarin into space.

From vision to action

There are a lot of parallels here to business. You see, the world is not out to help you succeed. In fact, I’d say the opposite is true. Starting, growing, and running a business is not only hard but the cards are also stacked against you. The expression “we’re building the plane while we fly it” describes most of the small and mid-sized firms I work with. This means we're figuring this stuff out as we go.

In the last Recipe, we talked about building a vision. We stated there were three main elements of vision: your purpose, your values, and your big hairy audacious goal — your BHAG.?

The question for today is: How do you translate that vision into concrete action?

The mission roadmap

A good starting point: Break down your vision?into one-year missions; if NASA called them missions we can too. If, for instance, your BHAG has a five-year timeframe, you can break that down into five one-year missions.

Let’s take a business that is trying to build a community — say, a community of fractional executives (more on that in another post!). Here’s an example of how that might look.

?The BHAG: Over the next five years, we will scale from 10,000 to 50,000 members and increase our profit per member by 5%.

Mission 1: Our goal for this coming fiscal year is to increase from 10,000 to 20,000 members and increase profit per member by 1%.

Because this is a simplistic example, let’s take it a step further and define some of the other important components of goal-setting, such as metrics and tactics.

In order to grow our membership base, we will need to do a bunch of things — and we’ll need to do them right. For instance, we will need to have employees serving our members. We will need happy members and we’ll need to execute the work we do for our members effectively.

Therefore, we will need to set targets in each of these categories because we know engaged employees, happy customers, and operating effectively are all key ingredients to success.

With this in mind, following is our Mission 1 roadmap.

Staying grounded

At 30,000 feet, your vision can seem vague and unattainable. But close up, broken down into more manageable tasks or tactics, it becomes clear and achievable.

It’s not rocket science. But it does require thought, commitment, and a bit of mental elbow grease.

What’s your BHAG? And have you been successful in realizing it — and if so, how? I’d love to get your perspective.

More food for thought!

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