New CEOs with a fresh vision for the company or established leaders who are charting a new course face a common problem: How do you get the executive team to agree on strategic trade-offs when deciding which investments to make? The remedy is to create a calculus of sacrifice” that assigns weighting to conflicting objectives.

In their article appearing online in Harvard Business Review, “How to Make Strategic Trade-Offs” SDG authors Mark Seidler and Florian Methling and their colleague Rüdiger von Nitzsch of RWTH Aachen University in Germany describe how CEOs and other leaders can talk explicitly about how much value they are willing to sacrifice in one objectives to achieve more value in another. The explicit understanding of how to handle conflicting objectives ensures greater alignment in decision making.

View the complete article on HBR’s website.