Why modern leaders must make trade-offs visible before they turn into crises
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker
For decades, business improvement seemed to rest on three familiar words: cheaper, faster, better.
Every executive understood them. They were expected by every board. Every consultant used them. Reduce costs. Increase speed. Improve quality. That was the operating logic of competitiveness.
And it was not wrong.
Organizations need efficiency. They do need speed. They do need quality. A company that ignores these three disciplines will eventually lose relevance. But the world in which leaders operate today is no longer simple enough to be governed by those three words alone.
Supply chains are fragile. Technology speeds up faster than organizations can absorb it. Climate and sustainability have moved from the margins to the center of strategy. Geopolitical shocks can disrupt carefully built plans overnight. And customers, employees, regulators, and communities now judge organizations by broader standards than price, speed, and performance.
This is where the 6-ER Framework, developed by Dr. Kerry Huang and presented through AwaCourage, offers a useful leadership lens. The framework expands the traditional three dimensions — Cheaper, Faster, Better — with three newer dimensions: Greener, Smarter, and Tougher. AwaCourage presents these as six dimensions of organizational competitiveness: the first three as survival thresholds, the last three as competitive moats.
While giving credit for the 6-ER Framework to Dr. Kerry Huang / AwaCourage, my purpose here is to translate the framework from supply-chain strategy into a broader leadership reflection, since for leaders its deeper message is about judgement.
Cheaper: The discipline of efficiency
Every organization must care about costs. Waste is not noble. A leader who ignores efficiency eventually loses the freedom to invest in anything else.
But Cheaper becomes dangerous when it becomes the only lens.
Many organizations reduce costs by cutting the very capabilities that make them strong: training, redundancy, trust, innovation, and institutional memory. The numbers may improve for a quarter or two, but the organization becomes thinner and more fragile.
The leadership question is not simply: “Can we make this cheaper?”
It is: “What are we weakening to make this cheaper?”
Faster: The pressure for speed
Speed matters. In volatile environments, delays can be expensive. Opportunities disappear. Competitors move. Customers lose patience.
But speed without judgment is only accelerated confusion.
In my leadership experience, especially in periods of transition, I learned that speed is valuable only when direction is clear. When the direction is unclear, moving faster can multiply mistakes.
The real leadership test is not whether a team can shoot. It is whether it can act quickly without becoming reckless.
Better: The promise of quality
Better is the most attractive of the old three. Who would argue against better products, better service, better decisions, and better execution?
But better requires discipline. It demands standards, feedback, patience, and often uncomfortable conversations. Mediocrity is usually cheaper in the short term. Excellence is usually more demanding.
The danger is that many organizations say “better” while rewarding only “cheaper” and “faster.”
Culture is not what we claim to value. Culture is what we protect when pressure rises.
Greener: Responsibility enters the strategy room
The fourth dimension, Greener, expands the conversation beyond immediate performance. It asks whether value is being created to endure.
This is not only an environmental question, although that matters. It is also a question of responsibility.
“Are we externalizing costs that someone else will eventually pay? Could unseen damage be the foundation of our success? Are we borrowing from the future to flatter the present?”
Sometimes the environment incurs costs. Employees sometimes do this. Sometimes by communities. Sometimes, by the organization’s own future.
Greener leadership asks whether success is sustainable, not merely profitable.
Smarter: Intelligence is not the same as wisdom
The fifth dimension, Smarter, is especially relevant in the age of artificial intelligence.
Organizations now have more data, dashboards, automation, and predictive tools than ever before. But more information does not automatically create better judgment.
A smarter organization is not simply one that owns better technology. It uses technology to improve decision quality.
AwaCourage connects the 6-ER Framework to governance: how organizations make trade-offs visible and own them, rather than pretending technology alone will solve capability problems.
AI may help leaders see patterns faster. But it will not absolve them of responsibility. Data can inform judgment, but it cannot replace character. Algorithms may optimize processes, but they cannot define purpose.
The leadership question is: “Are we becoming wiser, or merely more automated?”
Tougher: Resilience under pressure
The sixth dimension, Tougher, may be the most neglected.
For many years, organizations optimized themselves for stable conditions. They removed slack, simplified suppliers, concentrated risk, and built systems that looked efficient as long as nothing unexpected happened.
Then reality intervened.
A tougher organization is not rigid. It is resilient. It can absorb shocks, adapt under pressure, and continue to serve its purpose when conditions change.
Tougher leadership means building capacity before a crisis. It means developing people who can think, not only follow procedures. Building trust is what it means before testing it. It means ensuring the organization does not collapse the moment the plan becomes obsolete.
The real lesson: You cannot maximize everything
The 6-ER Framework is powerful because it exposes a leadership illusion: the belief that we can optimize everything at once.
We want lower costs, greater speed, higher quality, stronger sustainability, better intelligence, and deeper resilience. Of course, we do.
But leadership begins when priorities compete.
To make something cheaper may make it less tough. Making it faster might lead to less thoughtfulness. To make it greener may require patience. Making it smarter may require cultural change, not just technology.
The leader’s role is not to deny these tensions. The leader’s role is to make them explicit.
That is why Dr. Kerry Huang’s framework is useful beyond its original operational context. It gives leaders a language for the trade-offs they are already making, whether or not they acknowledge them.
Therefore, the central lesson of the 6-ER Framework is simple: strategy is not a wish list. It is the disciplined art of choosing what must be protected, what must be improved, and what trade-offs a leader is willing to own.
In the end, leadership is not about choosing six good words.
It is about choosing wisely when every good thing has a cost.
Questions for Reflection
1. Where are we currently over-emphasizing Cheaper at the expense of capability, trust, or resilience?
2. Where are we moving Faster without enough clarity about direction, risk, or consequences?
3. What does Better really mean for our customers, our people, and our long-term reputation?
4. What hidden costs are we passing to the future in order to make today’s numbers look better?
5. How can we use data, technology, and AI to become Smarter without surrendering judgment?
Download the Chairman’s Playbook Worksheet — Play 37: The 6-ER Framework for Leaders
📚Further Reading
1. Good Strategy Bad Strateg — Richard Rumelt
Rumelt argues that good strategy requires diagnosis, guiding policy, and coherent action — not vague ambition. It reinforces your point that leaders cannot maximize everything at once.
2. The Goal — Eliyahu M. Goldratt
A classic business novel about bottlenecks, flow, constraints, and operational judgment. It shows that improvement is not about optimizing every part of the system, but about understanding what actually limits performance.
3. The Lean Startup — Eric Ries
Ries shows how experimentation, feedback, and learning cycles help organizations move quickly while reducing the cost of being wrong.
4. How Big Things Get Done — Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
A very good modern book on planning, execution, and why large projects fail. It deals directly with optimism bias, risk, delays, overruns, and the need to build realism into leadership decisions.
5. Net Positive — Paul Polman and Andrew Winston
Polman and Winston argue that companies must create more value for society and the environment than they take from them. It connects well with your line that sustainability is not a public-relations accessory, but a test of maturity.
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