Guide · explorable
Tier Allocation
A fixed budget spread across the six tiers does not buy value evenly. Each tier has its own headroom and its own diminishing returns, so the next unit of spend is worth more at some tiers than others. Allocate the budget — then let it find where marginal value is highest.
Direction, not intensity. The consequential choice is which tier the next unit goes to, not how big the budget is. Because every tier saturates, the highest marginal value (the “marg” figure) keeps moving as you spend — and an even split almost never maximizes total value. The optimizer water-fills: it keeps adding to whichever tier currently returns the most, until every tier's marginal value is level. Change the landscape (e.g. AI-eroded, where execution tiers are commoditized and defensible headroom sits high in Owner Intent and Business Model) and the right allocation moves with it. This is an illustration of the allocation logic with stylized curves — to ground the headroom of a real organization, route the decision through schema-consult.
From even split to marginal value
Splitting a budget evenly assumes every tier converts spend the same way. It does not. A tier near saturation returns almost nothing on the next unit, while a high-headroom tier is still climbing — so the same money buys more value pointed at the second. For the theory of where a firm's resolvable headroom actually sits, start from the CFO path on the Guide (the CEO path frames the same bet at the portfolio grain).