![]() Sometimes the real BHAG is the friends you make along the way. The knock-off product, which let consumers specify a price they wanted to pay and matched them to hotels, wasn’t all that popular, but it led the company to a profitable business buying lodging inventory at wholesale prices and marking it up to consumers. Hohman completed the task on time, and Barton satisfied the wager. In 1998, he promised to shave his head if an Expedia engineer named Robert Hohman could re-create a competitor’s flagship product in 90 days. It’s a good, if modest, business considering it attracts a monthly audience roughly equal to 80 per cent of the adult population of the US.Ī BHAG, Barton says, doesn’t have to be successful to be considered a success. Zillow publishes home and apartment listings and makes money by charging real estate agents for referrals to potential homebuyers. That turned into Zestimate, the immensely popular home valuation tool from Zillow that lets you voyeuristically gauge the net worth of neighbours, ex-girlfriends, or the kids’ soccer coaches. But in the process of pursuing it, he and his co-founders hit upon a better idea: they would track home values as if they were stock prices. His first effort, a plan to sell homes at auction, was a dud. ![]() Eventually, Barton left Expedia and tackled the housing market. Ballmer laughed the young executive out of the room but later blessed a plan to take Expedia Group public. Five years later, he walked into a meeting with future chief executive Steve Ballmer and asked for a $US100 million marketing budget. “I find big, hairy, audacious goals are really motivating and inspirational,” he says.īarton founded an online travel agency inside Microsoft in 1994. ![]() Rich Barton, chief executive of Zillow Group, likes Collins’ formulation. Some executives may find the term uncomfortably anatomical, preferring to pepper their PowerPoint presentations with true norths and north stars, Manhattan Projects and Marshall Plans, and, most of all, moonshots.īarton at Zillow’s headquarters in downtown Seattle. Climbing Mount Everest is a classic BHAG. The BHAG (pronounced “bee-hag”) describes a method of stimulating progress by setting a clear, possibly unreasonable objective and chasing it relentlessly.Ĭollins was thinking of Boeing’s race to develop the 707, but he also applied the concept more broadly. In the 1994 book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, management guru Jim Collins introduced the concept of the “big hairy audacious goal”.
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