Strategy fails, and everyone blames execution. Wrong resources, wrong timing, wrong team. That’s the comfortable diagnosis — it keeps the ambition intact and blames the machinery.
Here’s what I actually think is happening.
Organizations set Big Hairy Audacious Goals and then spend enormous energy motivating everyone toward them — lofty mission statements, inspirational offsites, motivational buzzwords that sound like they belong on a poster in a dentist’s waiting room. And for a while, it works. People feel energized. The BHAG gives everyone unreasonable confidence that they can do it all.
Then the rubber hits the road. And everything fizzles.
Not because the goal was wrong. Because the people pursuing it were never equipped to handle the rigors of what it actually takes to get there. The motivation was real. The preparation wasn’t. All that inspiration just helped them propel their bullshit higher into the air before it came back down.
The problem with BHAGs isn’t the ambition. It’s the absence of what sits beneath them — proximate objectives. Concrete milestones, achievable with available resources and actual competence, that give people a genuine sense of progress. Not a dopamine hit from a mission statement. Real progress. The kind that compounds.
Here’s what strategy discussions tend to miss about the Post-it Note story. Spencer Silver wasn’t trying to invent a sticky note. He was trying to develop a super-strong adhesive for the aerospace industry. What he got was the opposite — a weak, pressure-sensitive glue that stuck to surfaces without bonding tightly. He called it “a solution waiting for a problem.” For five years, nobody at 3M knew what to do with it. Then Art Fry, frustrated with bookmarks falling out of his church hymnal, remembered Silver’s invention and built something entirely new from it.
The BHAG — super-strong aerospace adhesive — was never achieved. What 3M got instead was one of the most successful office products in history, born from a culture that allowed people to pursue proximate objectives without knowing in advance what problem they were solving.
That’s not a story about failure. That’s a story about what’s possible when you build in enough room for the valuable side effects.
The question worth asking isn’t just “what are we trying to become?” It’s “what will we have built along the way, even if we don’t get there?”
P.S. This is week twelve of a twelve-week curriculum exploring the fault lines that run through strategy, leadership, and organizational life. If this landed, start at the beginning — The Fluff Illusion is where it all started. And if you want the weekly essays that go deeper than the blog posts, subscribe to The Blind Spot — they go out every Sunday.