The critical question asked by a visionary company is not "How well are we doing?" or "How can we do well?" or "How well do we have to perform to meet the competition?" For these companies, the critical question is "How can we do better tomorrow than we did today?" They institutionalize this question as a way of life--a habit of mind and action. Superb execution and performance naturally come to the visionary companies not so much as an end goal, but as the residual result of a never-ending cycle of self-stimulated improvement and investment for the future...

A visionary company doesn't seek balance between short-term and long-term, for example. It seeks to do well in the short-term and in the long-term. A visionary company doesn't simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable. A visionary company doesn't simply balance between preserving a tightly held core ideology and stimulating vigorous change and movement; it does both to an extreme. In short, a visionary company doesn't want to blend yin and yang into a grey, indistinguishable circle that is neither highly yin nor highly yang; it aims to be distinctly yin and distinctly yang -- both at the same time, all the time.

Profitability is a necessary condition for existence and a means to more important ends, but it is not the end in itself for many of the visionary companies. Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the body; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life.

Highly visionary companies often use bold missions--what we prefer to call BHAGs (pronounced bee-hags, short for "Big Hairy Audacious Goals")--as a particularly powerful mechanism to stimulate progress.