Increments Are for Benchmarks. Exponents Are for Leaders.

Ask a CEO why the target is 10% growth and listen carefully to the answer. Most of the time there isn’t one. Gut feel. The market demands it. That’s what we did last year plus a little.

There is no plan behind that number. No real strategic planning. Just a benchmark wearing a tie.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth about arbitrary targets: your team can smell them. A number with no strategy underneath doesn’t inspire anyone; it demoralizes them, because it tells them leadership is guessing and they’re the ones who’ll be held accountable for the guess. Your people are counting on you, or they’ll be leaving you.

Two kinds of companies

Incremental companies benchmark. They copy competitors, accept industry-standard results, aim for the middle of the road. And the only thing I ever see in the middle of the road is dead animals.

Exponential companies plan. They ask what 10x would look like, not because 10x is guaranteed, but because the question forces real strategy: which market, which innovation borrowed from another industry, which constraint has to break. Then they do the unglamorous math of resources and sequence.

The difference isn’t ambition. It’s honesty plus work. Sometimes the honest answer after real planning is that 3% is what this year holds, and a true 3% with a real plan beats a fictional 10% every time, because the team can actually win it. Increments aren’t the sin. Increments without strategy are.

The test for your next planning cycle

Before you set the number, answer three questions in writing:

1. What would have to be true for this to be a 10x year, and is any of it in our control?
2. What are we deliberately NOT doing to make the target achievable? A target with no trade-offs is a wish.
3. Can every person on the leadership team explain why THIS number, without mentioning last year?

If the answers don’t exist, you don’t have a target. You have a benchmark, and benchmarks are how companies volunteer for the middle of the road.

The second question is the one teams skip, and skipping it is how a plan dies in the hallway instead of in the room. A target everybody nodded at and nobody traded anything for was never agreed to in the first place.

Strategic planning precedes ambitious goals. Not the other way around. If your planning process produces numbers instead of strategies, that’s fixable, and it’s exactly the fight worth scheduling.

This started life as an essay I published on jerrymacnamara.com in October 2019: Increments and Exponents. That original is still there, dated and unchanged. This is the rewrite, with what another decade of operating and coaching added.