Between now and the Christmas break, FY2027 gets decided.
Every company has a name for their annual planning cycle.
Meta: the H1/H2 review.
Amazon: runs it as OP1.
Salesforce: it’s V2MOM.
I’ve worked on these for executive clients inside all three companies.
Different framework, same process. The template shows up now. You write the case for the thing you want. Then it moves up a chain of people who each have their own agendas to protect. Then it gets read.
Your skip level has four of these strategy docs in their inbox. Your finance partner already has a number in mind. A committee reviews it on a Thursday without you. The board eventually sees only the total.
In that file is next year’s budget, next year’s headcount, and the thing you’ve been trying to fund for three quarters. It goes in at full size and comes back at half.
Underwrite the Downside: your proposal gets cut to the size of the risk someone else has to carry. Take that loss on your own books and the upside stays full size.
Pull up what you’re planning to submit. Or if it is easier start with FY2026 strategy. How many of those sentences describe what happens if it doesn’t work?
The Cut You Make in October
The expensive version doesn’t happen in the review.
It happens first, alone, at a keyboard. You write the number you think will clear instead of the number the work needs. The second hire comes out. The scope narrows to something nobody will object to. You tell yourself you’ll come back for the rest next year. Two people on your team are waiting on one of those lines.
Nothing in the document resists it. The sentence underneath still reads fine. Nobody sees that happen. It never makes the minutes.
And it’s the version that teaches your company what this idea is worth.
Why the Number Comes Back Smaller
An ask looks like a request for money.
What it’s doing is moving exposure off your desk and onto somebody else’s.
You brought the upside. Somebody has to supply the downside, and when it isn’t in the document they build one themselves. The one they invent has no ceiling. The one you name does. Out of the last three years of things that quietly stalled. Out of what their own boss will ask in a March review. And mostly out of the number they can absorb without it becoming a story about their judgment.
Then they size your ask to fit that number.
Your document left that number blank. That isn’t caution. It’s arithmetic on an incomplete page.
The Four Lines
An underwriter prices a risk and then agrees to carry it. The second part is what lets somebody else take the upside.
The loss. What failure looks like, in their terms
The price. What it costs them, not what it costs you
The carrier. Who absorbs it. Say that it’s you
The residual. What still stands the morning after
The first three make you credible. The fourth changes the arithmetic.
A failure that leaves nothing behind is a write-off. A failure that leaves infrastructure standing is an asset, bought at a price you set in advance, and you’re the only one in that meeting who can price it.
They can accept that or not.
They can’t accept it if it isn’t on the page.
What the Document Said About Itself
This summer I created a new offer.
To build the language system a company runs on.
The prospect’s problem: their strategy was being conveyed by five different teams in five different shapes. And a market-facing message that worked with one investor customer often didn’t translate with the next.
One section in the proposal named what they could do without Storied. The raw materials are plain text MD files and a private GitHub repository. Both are commodities in this AI era. Their own team could build that code repository in an afternoon, and I said so on the same page that was asking them to invest.
The sentence after it is the one that won the deal.
The container is a commodity. Architecting language a whole organization runs on is a specialized skill and expertise. And that’s not something that one can do on their own. The failure was named before anybody asked for it.
The Price of the Experiment
Add one page to what you’re submitting.
Not a risk register. One page that says what the failed project costs, who absorbs it, and what the company still owns the morning after.
That last part’s the move. A binary ask is win or lose, and somebody staring at a coin flip buys the smallest coin on offer. An ask with a residual or compounding value is a purchase. A failed experiment can still leave infrastructure the next three projects run on, or options nobody had in January, and those keep paying.
Price that, and the number stops being what the gamble costs and becomes what the learning costs.
The number locks in December.
Name what survives the failed experiment and you can’t lose.
Michael
P.S. When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help:
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