Goal Cascading Done Right
The Soviet Union wasn’t just an ‘evil empire’ or a place where people were jailed for their beliefs. It was a unique economic experiment that started as an ambitious industrial breakthrough but eventually collapsed under its own weight.
Nevertheless, many companies in the capitalist world copy its worst ideas today—without even realizing it.
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Inside the Club today:
1. Gosplan, version 2026
2. The more value you create, the fewer customers you have
3. Say ‘profit’ and your brain hears ‘costs’
4. Workflows instead of Goal-Flows
5. CEO Uncomfortable Questions
Gosplan, version 2026
The Soviet Union conducted one of the biggest failed economic experiments in human history – the hyper-centralizedplanned economy.
At the heart of the system was Gosplan, or the State Planning Committee. This behemoth was believed to know exactly how many rubber boots, hats, pens, cans of preserved meat, socks, condoms, pocket torches, or haircuts Soviet citizens needed per year.
Every five years, Gosplan issued a massive Five-Year Plan, cascaded down to the smallest details. Every state-owned organization—and there were no others—from schools and hairdressers to steel mills and nuclear power plants, received its own set of goals, KPIs, and funding.
It was a flawless system of state planning. Except for one minor detail: it didn’t work.
Nevertheless, every year, thousands of businesses in countries where Karl Marx’s ideas never prevailed break their North Stars down into objectives, targets, and KPIs, undertake thorough planning, and then wonder why it doesn’t work.
And replacing KPIs with OKRs or swapping rigid planning for Agile techniques rarely changes the outcome.
The more value you create, the fewer customers you have
I have two types of clients: those who need a new strategy and those whose current ones aren’t working.
They are all smart, capable CEOs doing their best to drive their businesses forward. But even they often wonder why such a deceptively simple idea—breaking down big goals into smaller objectives—misfires so often.
But there are a few inherent flaws in the idea. My Customer-Axis Framework fixes them.
In my work as a strategy advisor, I’ve seen most businesses trip over the same hurdles.
Hurdle 1. Say ‘profit,’ and your brain hears ‘costs’
Most of these companies frame their North Star around profit, market share, or revenue growth.
But setting profit targets for your team is like setting grade KPIs for your kid.
There are two problems here:
1. Profit and growth are not goals. They are outcomes. The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer—or a Patron—by delivering unique value.
2. Say ‘profit,’ and your brain hears ‘costs.’ Profit as a goal pulls the team away from customer value.
Setting profit as the ultimate goal while focusing specific OKRs on customer value creates a real disconnect for the team.
Solution 1
In the Customer-Axis Framework, we don’t set North Stars. We choose General Directions. We frame these directions around the Unique Customer Value, following our mission and focusing on the Big Customer Problem we exist to solve.
So, instead of saying, ‘We will become the market leader by 2030,’ we say, ‘We will solve this specific Big Customer Problem for thousands of people by 2030—and capture the value that follows.’ And then we can break this direction down to initiatives.
It might seem less specific, but a clear direction is better than a precise goal that becomes a dead end halfway through. We use growth numbers to synchronize our efforts, but we don’t treat them as a finish line we must cross no matter what.
Quality over quantity. We know that if we deliver customer value, and we do it smartly, profit will follow.
Starting a strategy with a profit goal is like starting a book with a dream of a Pulitzer Prize.
Hurdle 2. The more value you create, the fewer customers you (should) have
When a client comes to me, we always start with the Mission and the Big Customer Problem. And we often discover that the company already has customers who don’t actually have this problem.
Many companies resemble ships with barnacle-encrusted hulls. These are the old products, past experiments, and random customers that the CEO is too emotionally attached to cut loose.
The result? One group of customers wants ‘warm,’ another wants ‘red,’ and a third wants ‘round.’ Meanwhile, the company offers them all ‘soft.’
As Paul Graham said, don’t fall in love with your product; fall in love with your problem.
The more value you create for a specific Big Customer Problem, the more customers of one kind you get—but the fewer kinds of customers you have.
When you frame your strategic goal around profit, you subconsciously leave some wiggle room for random customers and side products.
It’s like eating cake with your eyes shut, hoping the calories won’t count.
Solution 2
When you try to fit irrelevant customers into your strategy, you’re just adding unnecessary clutter to your plans.
Focus on the customer value you’ve chosen.
Hurdle 3. Goal-flows instead of workflows
In the 20th century, companies relied on Goal Trees—or Objective Trees—to break down their overarching goals into specific objectives and targets.
The classic top-down trees are out of fashion these days. They’re seen as too rigid and directive. Instead, today’s managers are busy sketching Issue Trees, Driver Trees, Norton-Kaplan Strategy Maps, or OKR Alignment Maps.
Using OKRs instead of KPIs makes these maps more flexible than the Soviet Gosplan targets. However, no matter how many horizontal arrows you add to your strategy map or how many links between OKRs you draw, the essence remains the same. It represents the logic of future changes but doesn’t reflect the workflows you actually need to change.
When we draw a driver tree, we believe that we can account for every single detail, but that is rarely the case.
Solution 3
Your business is a set of workflows. So, if you want to improve it, use the tools that best fit its nature.
In the Customer-Axis Framework, we start with workflows—actual business processes. We map out all the major processes and challenge ourselves – which of them should we change to tackle the Big Customer Problem and create Unique Customer Value, and how?
Then, we can dive into each process and discuss changes to its individual elements in more detail.
Compared to driver trees, process maps are like 3D models versus sketches: where a sketch shows three key links, the 3D model reveals 10. The essence is clear in both, but the process map shows so much more detail.
I recently helped a mid-sized company holding its ground against industry giants. After a month of deep-dive preparationand a three-day intensive workshop, we replaced their blurry goals with a high-resolution map of their actual workflows.
The result wasn’t just a prettier chart—it was a plan so precise that every team lead finally understood exactly what to change.
If you’re ready to bring that level of clarity to your own organization, simply reply to this email and we’ll start the conversation.
Conclusion
How much do you lose when you make mistakes in breaking down your strategic goals into projects?
Your loss is the time you waste fixing problems while your competitors steal your customers.
By translating strategy into processes from the start, we get a clearer view of the upcoming changes and better link every step to the customer value we plan to create.
This week, paid subscribers to my newsletter will receive a practical guide to cutting costs through a process-driven approach.
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