Ninety nine stores supporting 99 villages is Thomas Lundgren's 2020 vision for his Dubai-based company, The One Total Home Experience.

Reaching 10 per cent of all Australians with a "gifted experience" is Naomi Simson's 2015 goal for her Sydney-based company Red Balloon. Averaging $1 (Dh3.67) revenue from every man, woman, and child in the US per week is Fred Deluca's 2010 focus for Subway.

What mountain are you climbing? This is the question Jim Collins poses to companies as he pushes them to articulate what he and Jerry Porras call a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), a trademarked term from their breakthrough book Built to Last.

The BHAG serves as a North Star (or Southern Cross if you're down under) for you and your team as you continue to drive the business forward on a day to day business.

It provides a vector along which all other decisions will be tested, helping everyone make the critical "yes/no" decisions that drive strategy. And it stretches the organisation to look beyond the day to day challenges that can consume tremendous amounts of emotional energy and help it remain focused.

99 Stores

Lundgren enjoys explaining that he launched his home furnishings company after an angel visited him with a mission to save the world from IKEA!

Though his initial goal was to crush IKEA, he's chosen to focus his people on a more important goal of launching 99 stores in support of 99 villages by 2020.

The big idea is a One-on-One Store-Village adoption programme where each of their stores supports one village in a neglected part of the world.

I would encourage you to go to www.theoneplanet.com to read about their initial successes in Kenya.

Red Balloon

Simson's firm, Red Balloon, helps individuals and companies gift someone a unique experience, like an F1 formula racing experience or hot air ballooning experience.

To provide her people with a tangible long term goal, in 2005 she set a ten year goal to provide 10 per cent of Australia's 20 million citizens with a gifted experience.

With an annual growth rate exceeding 50 per cent they have a goal to be over a third of the way by 2010 representing 750,000 experiences.

Subway

In 1965 seventeen year-old Fred Deluca had a 10 year goal to have 32 submarine sandwich shops. Not only did he beat the goal, but he recognised early on the importance of keeping a long term goal in front of himself and his team.

In 1995, after crushing their latest 10 year goal (5,000 stores by 95), he sought another bigger goal but realised that he needed to change the overall focus of the organisation from growing merely by adding new stores to driving more business into his existing stores.

He particularly liked the emphasis on "every man, woman, and child" which meant they would need to broaden their appeal (their 6 grammes of fat campaign helped tremendously). Now that Subway exceeds McDonalds in number of units in North America and other countries, their strategy appears to be working.

Verne Harnish is author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and founder and CEO of Gazelles Inc. Gazelles is represented in the Middle East by Dubai-based biz-ability