The 10x vs 10% distinction isn’t just a strategy concept — in practice it becomes the lens through which leadership teams decide where to focus their time, capital, and organisational energy.
At its core, it asks a straightforward question: does this initiative genuinely change the trajectory of the business, or does it simply improve what we already do?
10% thinking asks: How can we improve what we’re already doing?
10x thinking asks: What could make this business ten times more valuable — and strategically more powerful?
In my experience, that allocation often determines whether a company merely improves—or genuinely transforms.
10% Thinking
In most organisations, leadership spends the majority of its time on initiatives that refine the current system.
This is 10% thinking: incremental, low-risk, and focused on optimisation.
These efforts usually aim to:
- Improve operational efficiency
- Increase revenue modestly
- Reduce costs slightly
- Extend existing capabilities
Examples from the front line:
- Sales: Hire a couple of additional reps to increase capacity
- Operations: Negotiate suppliers for small cost reductions (3–5%)
- Product: Add features customers have requested
- Marketing: Increase ad spend to generate more leads
These initiatives keep the business functioning efficiently, but they rarely change its trajectory. They deliver predictable, linear growth — steady but unlikely to create a leap in enterprise value.
10x Thinking
If 10% thinking tweaks the engine, and rebuilds it for a different league.
It’s about asking the question every leader fears: What could fundamentally change the economics or scale of this business?
10x initiatives don’t just improve—they transform. They require bold moves, new capabilities, and the willingness to step into uncharted territory.
Examples in action:
- Sales: Shift from a team of individual reps to a global partner distribution network that scales far beyond current reach
- Product: Evolve a product into a platform or a recurring subscription model, creating ongoing value rather than one-off transactions
- Market: Expand into a significantly larger or structurally growing market, not just the next incremental segment
- Technology: Automate core processes to remove bottlenecks and unlock efficiency at scale
These are the moves that generate exponential growth, create durable competitive advantage, and dramatically improve margins. Unlike incremental improvements, they reshape the business, setting the stage for value creation that is tenfold, not just marginal.
Why Leaders Default to 10% Thinking
Even the most capable CEOs—whether newly appointed or seasoned veterans—often find that most of their attention goes to incremental improvements.
It’s rarely a matter of ambition or intent; it’s about what the organisation can reliably execute.
Across boards I’ve observed a few recurring patterns:
- Familiarity rules: Teams know how to deliver incremental projects efficiently, and leadership can rely on predictable results.
- Numbers are safe: Small gains are measurable, easy to report, and straightforward to defend to stakeholders.
- Change is uncomfortable: Transformational initiatives demand new capabilities, cultural shifts, and tolerance for uncertainty—things organisations rarely embrace without deliberate effort.
The result is subtle but powerful: even leaders committed to transformation may spend the bulk of their bandwidth on familiar, incremental work, while the initiatives with the potential to fundamentally shift the business often don’t get the attention they deserve.
Put simply: transformation is about impact, not effort. Ambition alone doesn’t create a step-change; the question is whether initiatives genuinely shift the trajectory of the business.
The Opportunity Cost
Incremental projects aren’t the problem—they’re necessary.
The problem is they consume leadership bandwidth.
The real issue is how they consume leadership bandwidth. Leadership time is one of the most constrained resources in any company. Many of us have seen executives spend 80–90% of their time on optimisation initiatives, leaving little room for the one move that could truly transform the business.
This is the essence of strategic opportunity cost: the trade-off between managing what’s familiar and pursuing initiatives with 10x impact.
How Boards Spot Transformational Opportunities
Boards that think in 10x terms don’t just ask about efficiency or incremental gains—they ask questions that challenge assumptions and expand perspective.
Some of the questions we’ve seen consistently provoke breakthrough thinking:
- Market: What opportunity could expand the company’s reach tenfold?
- Business model: What change could dramatically increase margins or recurring revenue?
- Distribution: How could we reach ten times more customers without ten times more cost?
- Capital: What investment could fundamentally alter the scale or potential of the business?
They push leadership to reimagine what’s possible, identify high-impact initiatives, and ensure the team’s focus includes moves that could truly transform the business.
Early Signals
Transformational opportunities often arrive before anyone realises they’re critical. Incremental improvements can keep a business humming, making everything feel stable—until the market shifts, competitors leap ahead, or customer needs evolve.
The most effective boards watch for these early signals:
- When small improvements no longer create meaningful impact.
- When competitors begin to redefine the market.
- When the business model shows signs of scaling limits or margin pressure.
By recognising these signals early, leadership can take decisive action on transformational initiatives while there’s still room to shape the outcome, rather than reacting once the opportunity has passed.
The Best Boards
Shape how the company sees opportunity and risk. They set a tone where bold ideas are tested, assumptions are challenged, and strategic thinking is the default.
- Dig into assumptions, asking why today’s models work and whether they will work tomorrow.
- Push leadership to stress-test ideas, exploring scenarios that could make—or break—the business.
- Encourage debate without paralysis, ensuring bold initiatives are discussed rigorously, not shelved out of caution.
- Spot early signs of change in the market or operations and ensure the company experiments before it’s forced to react.
Ultimately, they create a culture where transformational thinking is habitual, observable, and embedded in everyday leadership.
The outcome isn’t just better decisions—it’s the difference between boards that manage the business and boards that shape its future.
Spotting Opportunities
The difference between a good company and a great one isn’t how many incremental improvements it executes—it’s how leadership spots and acts on opportunities that can redefine the business.
In the next issue, we’ll explore what I call the Strategic Inflection Point Test — the moment when boards and leadership teams must decide whether the current model will continue to deliver, or whether the business needs to evolve.
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