We need a BHAG and a leader to champion it

BHAG: Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Pronounced beehag. A term coined by management guru Jim Collins in his 1994 bestseller, Built to Last.

It’s a plan designed to focus an organisation’s attention on a single, medium-term goal. It has to be audacious; it may even be ridiculed outside the particular organisation but, internally, it gives its staff a common purpose and a goal they believe they can stretch to achieve.

It could be argued South Africa has exactly that in the National Development Plan. It was a noble, carefully considered document compiled under the watchful eye of former minister in the Presidency Trevor Manuel, tapping some of the sharpest brains in the country.

They produced a 2030 vision that showed South Africans could choose a better future for themselves by being more active citizens.

It seems to make it into the public domain only when Manuel himself speaks about it or a floundering government speechwriter needs something uplifting to pop into a politician’s mouth.

Compare the NDP to Ethiopia, one of the poorest countries in the world. A socialist, landlocked, impoverished state, but one that is growing in double digits. It has a National Planning Commission, too.

Per capita incomes have risen from a paltry $100 (R1 558) in 1992 to $691 in 2014, and its Growth and Transformation Plan has the audacious goal of getting Ethiopia into the league of middle-income nations by 2025 — countries such as South Africa, with its GDP per capita of $6 000 (R93 000). The way it’s going, it might just succeed.

The difference? Ethiopia is singleminded in its goal. There is a unified drive to deliver on the targets and it has a champion — an influential government minister with the power to knock heads together when necessary to ensure that specific targets are met.

Had we begun implementing the NDP on its publication, we might not have got ourselves into this week’s ratings tangle.

There is a version of it happening in the government, business and labour work-streams designed to avoid the implosion of the South African economy and avoid a wholesale, damaging downgrade scenario taking hold — but without a single-minded purpose, that, too, runs the risk of losing momentum.

We could learn a thing or two about BHAGs from three South African business leaders who this week reached various stages of retirement in the companies they either founded or took to stratospheric heights.

Kevin Hedderwick retired as Famous Brands Group CEO and has been tasked with finding hardcurrency earnings for the group to achieve its audacious goal of R1-billion in operating profit by 2018.

He learnt his craft at SAB, the late former chairman of which, Graham Mackay, was into BHAGs before Collins gave them a name and built the small South Africa-focused brewer into a global powerhouse.

Another proponent of the BHAG, without probably ever using the term, is Brian Joffe, who retired as CEO of Bidvest as it split its operations into two distinct entities and their shares hit a combined record level of R430.

Banking sector disruptor Capitec has become a serious threat to mainstream banks 10 times its age. Founder Michiel le Roux handed over chairmanship to ex-CEO Riaan Stassen, having overseen nearly two decades of extraordinary growth.

Hedderwick grew the Famous Brands footprint to 10 times its size in 15 years, to a network of 31 brands with more than 2 600 stores worth R10-billion.

You could have bought a Capitec share for less than 100c at the height of the small banks crisis of 2002 and this week could have sold it for R570.

And Joffe, who started Bidvest in the hair-raising years following PW Botha’s destructive Rubicon speech, built a conglomerate as others like Anglo American dismantled theirs.

The point is that BHAGs need champions. A BHAG without singleminded implementation is just a silly-looking acronym.

Whitfield is an award-winning financial journalist, broadcaster and writer