The Right Number of Goals
My favorite questions come from people with a track record of success. Their questions tend to be messy, hard, and important to get right.
A founder whose work has built an entire industry that is changing the world asked: What is the right number of goals for an organization to pursue?
The question stuck with me for a few days. Festering in the back of my mind, wondering if I answered it correctly. When this happens, I like to revisit and examine the question across the 298 great projects in the Great Project Study.
The Answer
One.
One Big Ass Difficult Goal. Or, more politely: one BHAG.
The Short Reason Why
Two things to understand about a BHAG.
Its purpose is to pull teams together and give the organization something to fight for.
Almost by definition, a BHAG will hit a debilitating setback. A stockpile of cash can be very helpful to get through it alive.
If you take on multiple big goals at once, you get none of the benefits, while taking on all of the risk.
The Apple Story
I love turnaround goals. The results are black and white. They succeed or they fail. They show how a different set of choices can reverse the fortunes of an organization.
Jobs at Apple, 1997
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was 90 days from running out of cash.
He killed 70% of Apple's product line and bet the company on four products that didn't yet exist.
In front of his leadership team, he picked up a marker and drew a 2x2 grid on the whiteboard.
Consumer and Pro along one side. Desktop and Portable along the other. Four quadrants. One product per quadrant. Each would be insanely great.
Then he put down the marker and committed Apple, both financially and strategically, to achieving the BHAG: Make Insanely Great Products Again.
They would build one product, ship it, and move on to the next. Moving from the least difficult to the most difficult. Each release strengthening their goal muscles to take on the next product and project.
It would take two years to deliver the fourth and final product: an insanely great, low-cost consumer portable. But they delivered it.
The Start
They Won Big
Jobs said the strategy worked because the A team got put on every product. The best and brightest touched every product, instead of being fractured across four product teams.
Apple would extend that strategy for years, shipping the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming the company from a hopeless cause to a $4 trillion hit factory.
Research Is Different
A goal is different from the research that supports it. The two can progress in parallel.
During the Apollo years, NASA also ran the Mariner probes to Mars and Venus, X-15 hypersonic flight tests, and the Apollo Applications Program that became Skylab. None of these were the goal. None of them got the A team.
Apple ran research across all four product lines and product refreshes. Quietly, in the background. Never competing for the spotlight or the best engineers.
The rule is simple: research cannot take the A team, the budget, or the narrative from the main goal. The moment it does, it's not research anymore. It's a second goal in disguise.
Does It Still Hold?
There is a long list of successful organizations that changed the world using a one goal strategy. A few: IBM's System/360. Toyota's Prius. Boeing's 747. Amundsen's race to the South Pole.
But everyone says AI changes everything. That may be true.
Look at the two leaders.
OpenAI ships ChatGPT, Sora, voice products, hardware partnerships, and a consumer super-app.
Anthropic ships Claude.
Even Claude Code, their breakout enterprise product, is built on the same Claude model. Same bet. Same focus. Different packages.
In April 2026, Anthropic dethroned OpenAI as the king of the hill in enterprise market share for the first time. Annualized revenue is now ~$30B for Anthropic vs ~$25B for OpenAI.
Focus is still winning. Even in AI. Even by the market leader.
Disagree? Would love to hear from you. Adam@adamstack.com