Nobody's Going to Tell You Your Plan Isn't Ambitious Enough

Prompted by “Nobody's Going to Tell You Your Plan Isn't Ambitious Enough”, Harvard Business Review (Rebecca Knight (feat. Donald Sull)).

Most strategic plans don't fail because the goal was wrong. They fail because nobody stress-tested whether the goal matched what the company was actually willing to give up to hit it.

MIT Sloan's Donald Sull makes the sharpest point in this week's HBR piece: the real tell of an ambitious plan isn't the number on the page, it's how it's funded. Incremental goals run on money and people already sitting around. Real stretch goals need reallocation — pulling budget and talent off things people are already protecting. Leaders who skip that step and just declare a bold number are, in Sull's words, "somewhere between naive and delusional." Most plans stay safe not from a lack of vision, but because nobody wants to be the one who loses their team to someone else's bet.

What does that look like without a board watching?

At a smaller company that's one thing — less built up, easier to move. Further along, it's harder, not easier. You've got real departments now, real budgets people have built, real people who'd notice if you pulled them onto something new. And unlike a public company, nobody's forcing the conversation. No board asking why the plan is so conservative. No activist investor pushing for more. Just you, deciding alone whether you're being appropriately bold or just comfortable.

At your next leadership or peer meeting, ask the room one question: is this year's plan funded by reallocating something real, or just by spending what nobody's claimed yet? If it's the second one, the plan is safer than anyone's admitting.

This is exactly what a room of non-competing peers is good for — pressure-testing ambition honestly, which is the core of an OCTET board.

Originally posted on LinkedIn ↗