Start with Stretch Goals to Build a Successful Strategy
- Sep 16, 2025
- 4 min read
Most leaders say they believe in setting big goals. Yet when planning season arrives, those goals often shrink to fit the budget. The result? “Safe,” uninspired strategies - followed by late, painful course corrections when results inevitably fall short.
So, should you set separate stretch goals or just rely on a budget target? The reality is that a business must have both. Why?
Stretch Goals Spark Bold Thinking
Budget goals are about committing to a minimum acceptable performance. They rarely inspire breakthrough performance, as they are often incremental and based on what seems safe or achievable.
Stretch goals are about pursuing transformative outcomes that force new thinking, creativity, and different behaviors. They require people to challenge assumptions and redesign processes, not just work a little harder.
If you start with easy goals, you’ll naturally have more conservative strategies. If you start with bold goals, the gap between those outcomes and current state forces you to ask: What must be true for us to get there? That shift sparks innovation.
When Andy Grove introduced the concept of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in the 1970s, the “Objective” portion was always supposed to be a stretch. Grove pioneered OKRs at Intel, and John Doerr (one of his protégés) later popularized them at Google. As Doerr put it: "If you're getting 100 percent of your OKRs done, that's not good. You probably weren't aggressive enough. A good grade at Intel or Google would be 70 percent.”
Stretch Goals Give You Cover When Things Don’t Go as Planned, and Reduce Short-Sighted Course Corrections
Things rarely go 100% as expected. If you only plan to meet budget, inevitable setbacks will put you behind.
Once a budget miss is on the horizon, teams often spiral as they’re pressured to make up the gap. Desperate moves like last-minute revenue Hail Marys or short-sighted cost cuts only make things worse.
The paradox: easy goals feel safe but are risky; stretch goals feel risky but are safer in the long run.
By aiming higher, you build resilience. Even if you miss the stretch, you’ll often still hit, or beat, the budget.
Stretch Goals Unite Teams
Stretch goals create a rallying cry that people can quickly understand and get behind. The audacity of these goals is both daunting and unifying.
People quickly realize that to achieve their stretch goals, they can’t do it by themselves. They must partner across functional lines to make it happen.
Because stretch goals are so big, they create a shared urgency to get moving quickly.
They spark energy, creativity, and teamwork as people rally around a cause larger than themselves.
Progress against stretch goals is measured and celebrated with more intentionality, further bringing teams together.
Now, I’m not saying anything new. These concepts have been used by the best leaders and business thinkers over the years.
For example, Jim Collins introduced the idea of BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) in his book “Built to Last.” Collins’s BHAG concept aligns well with Andy Grove’s OKRs and the belief that they should have a stretch objective. In his book, Collins used the example of JFK’s moonshot challenge. That wasn’t a budget exercise, it was a stretch goal that redefined what was possible in space exploration.
Here is what Collins said about using BHAGs in the visionary companies he studied versus those that were struggling: “We found more evidence of this powerful mechanism (BHAGs) in the visionary companies and less evidence of it in the comparison companies…in fourteen out of eighteen cases.”
Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People reminds us in Habit 2: “Begin with the End in Mind” that everything is created twice — first in the mind, then in reality. In other words, your goals should come before your strategies.
Remember that while stretch goals and budgets have different targets, they inform and support each other. Budgets provide a baseline. Stretch goals are set to purposely overachieve that baseline, driving transformational upside growth (best case) or a buffer to ensure you hit budget (worse case).
In my own leadership experience, I’ve seen firsthand how a stretch goal, such as doubling sales or cutting service times in half, forces creative problem-solving we never would have attempted otherwise. I’ve led a lot of organizational turnarounds, and this is now a “go-to” part of my playbook for getting out of incremental and/or stale thinking. It sounds simple, and it is, but too often we fall asleep on the simple things that drive real change.
At the end of the day, budgets set the floor, the minimum we need to survive. Stretch goals define the ceiling, the bold outcomes that inspire people and pull organizations forward. And even if you fall short of a stretch when things don’t go as planned, you’ll often still land well above the “safe” target.
What’s one stretch goal you’ve seen energize a team and create transformational strategies?
