Today in our staff meeting, I brought an article I complied from the Internet and titled it “4 Ways to get started in Doing Excellence”. The first point was to go for BHAGs: Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals.
The term Big Hairy Audacious Goal (“BHAG“) was proposed by James Collins and Jerry Porras in their 1996 article entitled Building Your Company’s Vision. A BHAG encourages companies to define visionary goals that are strategic and emotionally compelling.
A true BHAG is clear and compelling, serves as unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a clear catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines.
—Collins and Porras, 1996
Clearly, this was an excellent topic of discussion and really challenged our thinking.
4 Ways to Get Started in Doing Excellence
- Go for BHAGs: Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals. Do not settle for small, moderate, or safe goals. Go for your wildest imaginations — the kind of dreams you can only dream about. These goals will truly make you come alive. Just to share one of my BHAGs — my long-term vision for my personal excellence school is to achieve an international scale and magnitude like that of Xavier’s school (anyone watches X-Men here?).
- Surround yourself with the best. The people around you play a significant role in shaping who you become. I have written an article on my blog before on how you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Consciously select whom you want to be around. Limit the time spent around energy vampires (also known as negative people).
- Learn from the best. There is no way to jump start your learning curve than to learn directly from the best in the field. Seek them out fervently and be like a sponge — absorbing all the knowledge they have to offer.
- Never stop improving. The journey of excellence never ends — it is a constant path of learning, growing, and being better. Always keep your eyes peeled for how you can be better. Keep looking inward to uncover blind spots and work on them. This has become something ingrained in me. I am a very introspective person by default and being a coach reinforces the importance of introspecting and self-improving even more, since there are more lives than just mine in question.
Those four points sparked me to start thinking forward in the direction of excellence in all that I do. The hard part is to get going and not settle for the status quo.
Comments? Discussion? What do you think?
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