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There’s a failure mode I see all the time inside companies, and it doesn’t look like failure at first. It looks like two smart executives doing their jobs. Everyone has a reasonable plan. Everyone has a clean set of metrics. Everyone is “moving.” And then you zoom out and realize the company is doing two contradictory things at once.

That’s a failure of local but not global optimization. People can be individually optimizing, and the overall system still doesn’t converge to something coherent. If you’re leading a team of leaders, this is one of the easiest ways to burn energy without creating outcomes.

The root cause is almost always the same: the goals were never set top-down.

Two reasonable goals can create an incoherent result

It’s easy to end up with two executives working on two things that sound compatible but actually collide.

Imagine one leader is accountable for enterprise revenue. They plan to convert low-value, self-serve customers into higher-value enterprise accounts, which means routing more traffic toward sales-led conversations.

At the same time, another leader is accountable for self-serve growth. They plan to pour budget into advertising the self-serve product, maybe even running TV ads or other broad acquisition campaigns to drive volume.

Individually, both goals are reasonable. But together, you get a company that’s paying to pull customers in one direction and then pushing them in the other. The marketing message says “self-serve,” the website experience nudges people toward enterprise, and the customer ends up confused about what you actually are. And if you only look at each executive’s dashboard, it can still look like progress because both people can point to activity and wins.

That’s what happens when executives are individually optimizing things that seem reasonable without a clear top-down priority that resolves the conflict up front.

You can see the “local metrics create global incoherence” story in the real world when incentives are misaligned. In the Wells Fargo fake-accounts scandal, employees were spurred by sales targets and compensation incentives to to boost sales figures, which is what happens when a system rewards the metric and not the outcome. 

What “company-wide KPIs” actually means

The issue isn’t that executives don’t have metrics. The issue is that metrics are easy to create in isolation.

If you don’t set goals from the top down, you end up with a company where every leader can rationally pursue something that looks correct in their lane, but the lanes don’t line up. That’s how you get a product experience that feels inconsistent, a go-to-market motion that contradicts itself, and customers who aren’t sure what you even are because different parts of the company are telling them different stories.

This is why I like frameworks that explicitly force measures to follow strategy instead of letting strategy “emerge” from a pile of local dashboards. The Balanced Scorecard is one example of that idea: it’s a way to tie performance measures , instead of letting every team pick metrics that look good locally. 

The fix is structural: set a clear, cohesive set of company goals first, then derive what each executive owns from that. That way, “enterprise,” “self-serve,” “marketing,” and “product” aren’t four separate strategies. Four workstreams are serving the same strategy.

And this is why “collaborate more” isn’t the answer. If the goals are incoherent, collaboration just means more meetings where people negotiate contradictions instead of shipping toward a single priority.

The practical fix: Decide first, then measure

The mistake I see is that leaders will ask executives to set their goals and then try to reconcile those. That sounds reasonable. It also tends to fail, because reconciliation is not the same as coherence.

If you want coherence, the sequence has to be top-down. You decide what the company is actually trying to do, and then you derive what each executive should do from that. You do not let strategy emerge from a pile of local dashboards.

Here’s the simplest way I think about it:

• Set the top-down goals in plain language: what are we actually trying to do?
• Derive each executive’s goals from that, instead of letting them define goals in isolation.
• Sanity check that the enterprise motion and the self-service motion are not fighting each other.
• If there’s a conflict, decide the priority at the top, instead of letting it get “resolved” through meetings.

That’s it. It’s not complicated. It’s just easy to skip, because local dashboards feel like certainty.

Don’t let optimization replace leadership

If you remember one thing, make it this: you can’t have executives individually optimizing things that seem reasonable and expect the company to converge to something coherent.

If you do, you’ll get an incoherent result. You’ll spend money pulling in one direction and then pushing in the other. You’ll end up with strategy drift that looks like execution.

The job at the top is to set a clear, cohesive set of goals that the company is pursuing and then derive what different executives will work on from that. That’s what company-wide KPIs are for—to force coherence.