Actually, this fable is more about earning your luck than simply getting lucky—a fitting metaphor for the rocky and unpredictable road that Builders tread to pursue their dreams. The overwhelming majority of Builders claim that their success has been a serendipitous journey, and the luck they enjoyed was usually earned, often at great cost. They have done that by focusing on doing work that is meaningful to them and going deep to discover relevant clues along the way. They set big goals and engaged completely in the work at hand.

As a consequence, Builders are better prepared to turn things that, on the surface, may seem bad or useless into opportunities. What may appear to be brilliance, heroism, or passive good luck is actually a saga of passion, depth, and skill. Because they love what they do, Builders invest the time to acquire detailed knowledge about things that matter. It is focus and knowledge more than brains or brawn that allows them to observe the subtleties of their path and then take advantage of serendipitous events. Like the princes in the story, Builders describe their path as adventures filled with bad breaks and unplanned good fortune. Only a prepared mind and open heart prevails.

No, they are often essential. In fact, Builders use planning and goals—often big goals—to put themselves into a serendipitous position. In Built to Last, Collins and Porras coined the phrase Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) to describe how visionary organizations drive boldly toward their aspirations based on their core values. BHAGs don’t just exist in parallel to your ideology; they are a manifestation of it. They are an extension of who you are and what matters to you.

“To set Big Hairy Audacious Goals requires a certain level of unreasonable confidence. Like (President Kennedy’s) moon mission, a true BHAG is clear and compelling and serves as a unifying focal point of effort—often creating immense team spirit,” they say.^[3] And like the moon, the goal even outlives its creator, as the space race lost no momentum after the president’s assassination. He never saw Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface, but the goal had already galvanized the nation.

“A BHAG engages people—it reaches out and grabs them in the gut. It is tangible, energizing, highly focused. People ‘get it’ right away; it takes little or no explanation. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines.”^[4] These BHAGs involve a consistent pattern of making bold, risky investments in audacious projects—to stimulate forward progress while still preserving core values and ideology.

BHAGs give you something tangible to be authentic about. Much has been said about the need for leaders to be authentic, but Builders will tell you to be careful about what that means. Your BHAG must be ‘real,’ but the world doesn’t want to know everything you’re thinking.

The battle cry for authenticity is a well-intentioned call to action that takes subtle judgment in its execution. In other words, you are well advised to summon the courage to demonstrate that you are honestly connected to the goal. Your behavior has to match your words. And your words should take the form of personal stories rather than clever quotes from heroes you’ve never met. For anyone to give a damn about what you’re recruiting them to do, people want to know the skin you have in the game. You’ve got to find your own way to express the passion and personal meaning you have invested in this goal or mission.

On the other hand, even Churchill—the twentieth-century leader who is most often quoted in canned pep talks—wasn’t authentic all the time. Churchill didn’t reveal his doubts about Britain’s survival during World War II when those possibilities crossed his mind. Nor did he dwell in public on his predilection for heavy drinking and womanizing. Neither Churchill nor Lincoln obsessed in public over the nagging depression that dogged them throughout their extraordinary careers. Nor does America want to know about a bad day the president might be having.

To thine own self be true. But which self should you be true to? You are a man or a woman, a son or daughter, a student and teacher, a lover and loved one. As explored in Portfolio of Passions, you are likely to have many passions. You don’t have to have multiple personalities disorder to experience different selves when you pursue those passions, and some of them are nobody else’s business. Hazel Markus, a cognitive psychologist, noted, “There isn’t just one you; you have many selves packaged up in your various roles in life.”

Jimmy Carter was criticized in the media for his honest admission to Playboy Magazine that he had felt lust for a woman, even though by definition that’s authentic and unavoidable if you are a healthy heterosexual male. His intention was to reassure folks that they could think “naughty” passing thoughts and still choose to behave in ethically and spiritually driven ways. But Carter’s empathy was not judged appropriate to his role, nor did it advance his mission as president of the United States and leader of the Free World.

It’s incredibly unfair, perhaps. The reality is that some parts of your authentic self are better off left in the shadows if they are not useful and relevant in directly supporting or furthering your goals and establishing the integrity of your objectives. This is where BHAGs can provide the boundaries to keep you from straying from your message.

Martin Luther King, Jr., anchored his life’s purpose and inspired the world with his indelible dream. By brilliantly articulating his audacious goal and steadfastly living his values, King, with a compelling clarity of vision, led a transformation of humanity’s perception of what was possible. In some respects, his impact has been greater than even he planned. King did not set out to create his permanent legacy in world history. He did have the courage of his convictions and create lasting change.

Rev. King also achieved less than he hoped for—racial discrimination still lurks in shadows in every society. But the power of his goal will forever empower progress in the human condition.

Rabbi Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress said, “Our beliefs are our assets and our liabilities. Our choices make the difference about whether they hurt or help our cause.” He has spent a career working with rabbis, popes, and cardinals—helping to build a bridge between Judaism and Christianity. Rabbi Singer’s goal to bridge the faiths is big, hairy, and audacious. And today, he’s seeking to bring together Jewish, Christian, and Islamic clergy to join in dialog.

“It’s not like we’re just do-gooders. Some people believe the world is fixable, which is nice; but we believe in incremental and small wins that add up to permanent change. That’s the way to make a difference,” he contended.

“It’s really important not to get discouraged” that you’re not achieving your goal right away, he says. BHAGs don’t just become valuable for the first time when they are achieved—their first value is in defining the journey. It’s “what happens to you along the way that matters—how you are changing as you change the world,” Rabbi Singer insisted.

“Your influence may seem relatively small at the moment, but it’s all the little steps that stack up to high impact. You change the world person-by-person, town-by-town, rabbi-by-rabbi, priest-by-priest, minister-by-minister, imam-by-imam, denomination-by-denomination; one idea and one life at a time.”

No matter how grand their ambitions, Builders like Singer did not imagine how different their success might be from their plans, nor did they have a roadmap in their pocket that resembles the path that they took. Their goals help them build a vision and create a “way of life that they are seeking.” But if you could have asked them 20 or 30 years ago to describe the life that they hold in their hands today, very few could have done it.

Steve Jobs’ aforementioned vision to put a computer on every desk was realized, but Apple wasn’t the company that delivered 95% of those machines. Gandhi never achieved his goal to unify the Hindus and Muslims, but few have done more to create peace and freedom than this man with a loving vision.

For most Builders, the journey is like shooting for the moon and instead hitting Mars—perhaps a better, but different, outcome than envisioned. Had they not been prepared to explore in the first place, they would not have been able to hit a better target. Builders are the first to admit (at least, in private) that planning works, but as the adage goes, the plan itself rarely does. While it’s hard to make progress without planning, Builders find that what they seek in the long term doesn’t always turn out as expected.

Publisher Steve Forbes advised that one of the most important “things you have to be prepared for in life is serendipity.” He said, “You may be looking for something but you may end up with something else if you have your eyes open.” Forbes shared the classic example of Ray Kroc, the man who created McDonald’s. He was in his fifties in a so-so career as a milkshake machine salesman when he stumbled across this hamburger stand run by the McDonald Brothers and said, “My God, if they expand, I can sell them more milkshake machines.” But when the McDonald Brothers didn’t think the business should expand the way Kroc envisioned, he bought them out and the rest, as they say, is history. Indeed, for Builders who stay true to what they know and what matters to them, things actually have a knack of turning out better than they imagined, Forbes said.

This is one of the more subtle, but critical, powers of BHAGs. They instantly capture your heart and head. They deliver clear direction. Don’t confuse direction with a roadmap, however. Builders have the former, but not the latter. Take the race to the moon, for example. What is often forgotten is that when the BHAG of “a man on the moon and back before the end of the decade” was conceived, America had no clue how to actually accomplish this.

The meaning of the mission was not in the moon or the pretense that we knew how to get there. The moon is just a lump of rock that messes with earth’s gravity, tides, and our mood swings. The meaning of the moonshot was in our audacity to consider an actual journey to this remote and mystical place. Kennedy’s declaration stirred the nation’s competitive spirit. Science became a metaphor for the triumph of democracy over totalitarian communism. It wasn’t that we knew how to do it, but that we believed we had to do it.

This is frankly how most Builders live their lives, and it is the secret to lasting success. It’s all about meaning first and method second. Although scientists had some ideas about how to approach a lunar launch, no one had anything close to total knowledge about how to get there and back, particularly Kennedy. The direction was clear, but there was no blueprint. The BHAG itself was a container for America’s dream; it became the context for driving progress, bridging the gap between uncertainty and reality. BHAGs help you survive that kind of ambiguity. The moon-shot BHAG helped Americans tolerate an unreasonable, overwhelming and excruciatingly detailed course of action and have the patience to chart out what basic measurable steps could be taken to get there. It gave a country uncharacteristic courage to swallow public failures, learn from them, improve, and eventually prevail through thousands of tiny steps.

Builders take bold risks that they measure in small steps. That’s what Rabbi Singer is doing. That’s what Michael Dell has always done.

“I would characterize the start up of the company as a series of experiments,” Dell said, pointing to the white board where he had listed noble ideas that missed the mark. “Most of which failed, but none of which were large enough disasters to destroy the company.”

Most people don’t do well with ambiguity. Builders do. Ambiguity is the enemy of audacity and innovation. It strikes fear in our heart and doubt in our heads. When was the last time you were able to sell an idea to your boss, your partner, or your team without an exact battle plan for getting it done? Did they not want a detailed process for getting there, and certainty about the outcome?

It’s human nature to crave certainty and repudiate ideas that don’t have guarantees. And yet, very few things do. Great ideas and great careers don’t have perfect plans before launch date.

Michael Dell had just this sort of BHAG. It was clear and confident, with a paucity of detail or certainty. But that is not how it looks when you read about Dell. The press gushes over him as if he found a chest hidden in his freshman dorm room containing the treasure map for his life.

If you’ve met Michael, however, he is a self-effacing, down-to-earth guy who reassures you that he had no precise plan. He just dared to go where no one has gone before. The compelling nature of the idea or goal, not the plan, is what launches entrepreneurs. Dell realized he could bypass retail stores and sell his computers to consumers direct by mail—and got almost instant validation—netting a cool $80,000 in his first year. Not surprisingly, he opted for selling computer equipment out of his bathtub at University of Texas, Austin, instead of getting a college degree.

In the time he would have taken to earn a sheepskin, he became the youngest person to take a company public on the stock market. But within a year, he faced disaster when his warehouses overflowed with excess inventory of electronic components. The enthusiasts’ package of computer technology he thought would sell bombed with consumers. Although Dell is known for his big idea about bypassing traditional retail stores, he desperately needed to clear excess inventory. It very nearly killed the company until he decided to distribute through CompUSA and Best Buy stores for awhile, temporarily violating his BHAG to sell only by mail.

No sooner did he get things back on track when the firm hit the wall again. Dell struggled with losses in a business that would prosper later—laptops—and he also faced costly mistakes in Europe. He was forced to cancel a second public offering to the stock market.

Clawing his way out of this second big slump, Upside magazine named Dell turnaround CEO of the year, and he delivered a line that has become legendary: “I hope I don’t ever win that award again!”

Like most Builders, what Dell had going for him on this roller coaster ride was an odd mixture of accountability AND audacity. It’s tough to find the right word for this leadership quality. The Yiddish dictionary gets closer: We’re talking about a responsible form of chutzpah—the non-conformist gutsy audacity to create something despite all odds, for better or for worse. In this case, responsible chutzpah leaves out the completely self-absorbed arrogance associated with the word.

Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts,’ presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to.”^[5] The difference here is that long-term Builders are accountable—they are people who deliver for themselves and the outside world at the same time. Accountability means “to stand and be counted, as a part, a cause, an agent, or a source of an event or set of circumstances.” Audacious accountability means you consider your life from the point of view that how it goes and what happens is up to you. Don’t worry; this is not an infomercial for so-called human potential movement psychobabble. This is one of best lessons from human history: You may or may not be to blame for what happens to you, but either way you are responsible for doing something about it.

Builders don’t claim to feel in total control, but they do have the audacity to embrace the idea that they alone (or with the help of a Creator) are building this life for a reason, rather than life being something that happens to them while they’re making other plans.

If this sounds like a contradiction in terms—if you feel a paradox, oxymoron, or even a paradigm shift coming your way here—then you’re right. In fact, very few long-term achievers would describe their personal goals as being audacious or demanding Herculean accountability, per se.

Unlike the bold visions they may paint for their organizations, Builders do not describe what drives them personally as big, hairy, or audacious. Size doesn’t matter. The scope of the goal and its relative audacity were irrelevant to them, or perhaps they just preferred not to think in those terms.

In fact, there was a definite sense of na ïve enthusiasm to many of these conversations that transcends logic and is certainly beyond the scope of conventional thinking. These people viewed what they were doing with a Zen-like air that makes you wonder whether one of the reasons they could pull off such audacious achievements was because they just didn’t see them as all that audacious!

In Built to Last, Collins and Porras found that “BHAGS looked more audacious to outsiders than to insiders. The visionary companies didn’t see their audacity as taunting the gods. It simply never occurred to them that they couldn’t do what they set out to do.”^[6]

Very few Builders even gave their work an intimidating label like a Mission, Calling, Cause, or Higher Purpose. Such a pedestal can develop as an unnecessary torment. Indeed, Builders describe their objectives as essential—that it must be done—that it deserved to happen. They believed it was serious, the right thing to do; a better way. It was what they had to do now. It was long term, but urgent.

Builders tell you about the joyful and painful accidents that lead to a full life. It’s extremely important, however, to emphasize here that they are very picky about which serendipitous events they choose to pursue. They only go after that which means a great deal to them—stuff they love or find painful to ignore—something that matters so much they find the courage to engage, despite the opinions of others, not because of them.

Builders don’t set up preachy descriptions that might unwittingly create any more barriers to success than those already lurking out there. Instead, the long-term achievers obsess more about setting up specific ways to measure their progress.

Without feedback, you cannot adapt or improve. Measurement provides that feedback. And every time you get more information about how to do better, you are making a deposit in your Personal Capital account. It’s what Builders do.

So here’s the problem: We love to keep score as long as we are winning! When we’re not—well, we don’t really want anyone to see the report card. Builders see it differently.

“On the first day I was CEO, I only had one slide on the board in front of the entire management team. And there was one number on the slide,” said Robert Lane, who leads John Deere & Co., Inc. Some employees tell him they remember the number had something to do with financial or operating metrics, but it didn’t. The number was 18,000, and it meant “that we were going to have 18,000 employees within six months having written objectives of how we were going to work together—aligned teamwork—all linked to our overarching goals.”

That alignment of people and the measurements is key. “We spend a great deal of time and energy in setting the right goals and finding the right ways to measure them,” Michael Dell said. Big or small, Dell scrutinizes relevant details of what they do like a crime scene investigation “to see what makes a difference to customers.”

Dell pays close attention to the evidence and refuses to be misled by “the things that we think are great because people ought to like it.” As we walked with Michael through the slippery Davos snow in hiking boots and business suits, Dell recalled his famous tale about a time when he, as a teen, struggled initially with his paper route. It was “going nowhere” as a money-making venture until he noticed that people tend to buy a lot of new things—like newspaper subscriptions—when they had major changes in their lives, like moving into a new community, changing homes, having kids, getting married, and so on.

This observation yielded a breakthrough idea—to focus on life events and changes among the customers he served. This allowed him to track that data to fulfill their unique needs at various stages of their lives. This same early interest in mapping customer data would later give him insight into buying habits for his computer business. As a teen, it generated success that brought him $18,000—a better salary than his skeptical teacher—and enough money to buy a BMW in high school when his peers were still asking for allowance money.

Measuring things helps you take account of progress on your long hike toward your goal, but it won’t tell you if you’re headed in the right direction. It’s important to start with the End in Mind, but it could be a dead end if you’re in such a hurry to set a goal for yourself or for the sake of others without checking in with the first part of this book: finding a meaningful passion in life.

The goal-setting process is both powerful and dangerous because it can make you effective at achieving objectives—to take the hill, as they say—without any assurance that it’s the right mountain for you to climb. Goals have no intrinsic meaning unless you invest meaning there. Goals don’t come with a built-in guarantee that you’ll benefit by reaching them or enjoy the process of getting there, nor do they assure you’re on the right track. Goals, by their nature, don’t necessarily require focusing on inspiration as much as they do on perspiration and the sheer pragmatic effort of getting things done.

There seems to be some confusion about what Steven Covey was evangelizing when he said start all things with the “End in Mind.”

The challenge is to know which end to keep in mind.

“It’s not a goal or even a destination necessarily,” Covey said, “It’s a way of life” to which we should aspire. “Let’s say you’ve just had a heart attack,” a key metaphor that Covey uses in his book, The 8^th Habit. “What goals would you set with that life-threatening priority overhanging your decision? What are the important things worth doing with the time you have left? Why do we wait until we’re hurt or injured to make decisions with the same level of caring for our future?”

It’s important to curb the rational impulse to set goals too soon on your journey. Goals become a barrier to success and satisfaction when they’re not really yours. This is what we call the Secret Life of Goals—when the milestones themselves take on a life of their own. Goals can dictate success for its own sake or by someone else’s definition, not necessarily success that matters to you and the stakeholders you care about.

In the world of business, you may be tired of hearing about Jack Welch’s 20-year record as CEO of General Electric. But there is one last thing you should know about a BHAG that was once credited for his lasting success that ended up taking on a secret life of its own. Business books like Built to Last and many others lauded Welch’s relentlessly clear goal to be #1 or #2 in market share in every GE business. But after years of pounding away at this no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners battle cry for market share leadership, Welch himself was the first to blow up the definition he had worked so hard to proselytize.

The change was provoked when a group of senior military officials was invited to GE’s training center in Crotonville. GE has long been known for inviting people from all walks of life to parachute in and swap ideas and best practices. One colonel insisted GE’s market share goal of being #1 or #2 in every business allowed the company to get off the hook too easily. Welch was shocked.

Anyone with a little creativity, the colonel explained, “could describe a market so narrowly that you could become number one,” Welch said. If you want to be in first place, then just measure success “in terms of being the number-one producer of chairs with curved armrests. I suddenly could see how you could game that system,” Welch acknowledged.

“That idea hit me straight between the eyes,” he said. It undermined the purpose of the BHAG in the first place. He never expected that an idea as pivotal as this would come from someone outside the company, let alone outside the business world.

What is more surprising is that it actually happened at all. “Neutron Jack,” as he was once called for his stubborn stance during massive layoffs, was willing to stop being Jack long enough to realize the hill he was charging up was no longer the hill that needed taking. He stopped being the commander and chief for a moment and stepped to one side, looked over, and saw himself as a boss going in the wrong direction. He did not fall for a classic case of the Secret Life of Goals hijacking the real mission. It was serendipitous that the “Cavalry” arrived in the knick of time to deliver that surprising message AND that Welch was ready and able to hear the overall meaning of the mission—which for GE was growth, not just share.

Andy Grove had a similar epiphany. The former CEO of the world’s largest chip company, Intel Corporation, is also known for his relentless clarity and disarmingly penetrating questions. He has been on well over a dozen business magazine covers unapologetically heralding Grove as one of the best business leaders in human history. When PBS’ Nightly Business Report asked Wharton judges to vote on their top pick among CEOs of all time, they chose Grove.^[7]

During one particularly difficult crossroad for Intel, Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, once CEO of Intel and creator of Moore’s law, were sitting in a cubicle pondering the future of the business. (Yes, it’s a tradition for even the boss to have a cubicle at Intel.)

What if things continued to get much worse and the board got rid of him? Grove speculated. Moore said the board would undoubtedly bring a new person in who would have courage as an outsider to do what few CEOs who are set in their jobs would be willing to do: Dump the core business. For Intel, this was memory chips. An outsider could come to the rescue to do something that dramatic, but not an insider who had put his career and ego on the line to stay bravely on the original course.

Grove had been raised in socialist Hungary, where he had resented a system in which the communist party bosses were never questioned and therefore innovation was impossible. His Jewish family had fled the Nazis during WWII, and he had changed his name four times, first to hide it and then to make it possible to pronounce. He had reinvented his life as an engineer in America with big dreams that he brought to Silicon Valley. Grove and his team sucked up the courage to drag themselves in front of the board with a preposterous idea that reinvented and, in retrospect, saved the company. He did radical surgery on himself, no matter how painful that was, exorcizing plans to hold onto Intel’s largest business before it imploded on them.

Did they get lucky? Maybe. Did they earn it? Absolutely. The life of Andy Grove mirrors the meaning of the tale of the Princes of Serendip. Luck favors the prepared.

Serendipity comes to those who do their homework and have the courage to do reality checks to determine whether or not they are still on course to achieve what actually matters about their goals. That brutal objectivity delivered the renewed growth that saved Intel.

By using meaning as their guide, Builders like Grove keep their goals honest. Not surprisingly, when the BHAGs embody what really matters, Builders find themselves well prepared to seize the best opportunities that serendipity can provide. Like the three princes, their successful journey is neither luck nor predetermined destiny. By living their values and paying attention, they are able to turn a steady stream of inevitable, unpredictable, and challenging events, in life and work, into good fortune.