How to Make Strategic Trade-Offs

How do you get the executive team to agree on strategic trade-offs when deciding which investments to make? There is a way to assign weight to conflicting objectives.

Increasing market share, entering new markets, and pursuing innovation are all objectives that CEOs enthusiastically tout the advantages of. The targets were ambitious. The troops support the vision. They don't talk about how much value they are willing to give up in order to get more value. They don't talk about sacrifice when it comes to their goals. In the absence of explicit guidance, executives and the managers beneath them substitute their own judgement for the CEO's, weight conflicting objectives differently, and pull the organization in many different directions at the same time.